This was another successful year in which kids from kindergarten Zapruđe (Zagreb, Croatia) took the
lead role in observing the sky, clouds, and atmosphere changes before, during, and after the “Look up Cloud
Hunters” competition that took place internationally in April. Children were the age of 6 and were able to
understand even more what was actually going on and why we, or better said “they” were doing this since this
was our 2 nd year onboarding this competition and conducting easy observations, measurements, and
exploration of the cloudy sky.
How did we start… - As mentioned before, this year was an uprising from the last year’s onboarding to the
GLOBE’s competition train. First of all, we made clear to the children’s parents what we did the last year and
why this part of education is important, not only for children but for all present generations – us, grown-ups,
but the generations that are about to come as well. This was done by the oral presentation in which we
included photos and video materials from the last year’s competition and activities done by their children and
introducing them to this year’s fade-in to more similar activities as well as presenting them to the GLOBE
community in general. Some of them started to use the GLOBE Observer app as means of having a great family
time during weekdays or even more weekends. This feedback gave us a push forward knowing that they
understood what we were aiming for and were ready to back us up, or even better said – parents were ready
to back up their children in some goodness.
This April we had the luck of having a cloudy sky almost every day so that the children had the opportunity to
actually see the changes and differences in clouds we talked about in theory before conducting the
observations on the field. Later on we discussed the visual differences between the sky in photos during the
competition week, difference of the clouds; we were trying to learn their names (some were hard so the main
point was to just recognize them and what they “mean” or “do” so that we could somewhat “read the sky”),
and we were also telling our own stories about the clouds (exp. “The argument of the two clouds” – kids also
made simple dolls made out of sticks and cotton and were performing simple doll-theatre shows for each
other). Following were also art activities such as “my cloud” (painting of the clouds we saw), and “this cloud
reminds me of…” (Comparing clouds to actual people, animals, and things).
The final touch was when we decided to try to make a cloud. It sounded insane, unimaginable to children, and
that it happened… - We showed kids why it’s important to study, to examine, to question things, to ask
questions and even more questions, and even more, and more, and more… We made a cloud in the bottle and
this was a big success because afterwards children started to take initiative and were trying to do some more
exploration of sky and clouds.
Will we continue? – Oh yes… Just you try to stop us!

Izidor Radmanović, mag. praesc. educ.
kindergarten teacher in Kindergarten Zapruđe, Zagreb (Croatia)

Items