Pinecones open in dry air and close when it is damp. One cone on a windowsill, a simple chart, and your child becomes the household weather forecaster for weeks.
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I did not know this was real until my son insisted his pinecone had 'closed itself' overnight. He was right, and I have thought about it ever since.
It became a small daily ritual: check the cone at breakfast, mark the chart, look out of the window and see who was right.
It is the slowest activity in this whole basket collection and somehow the one that has lasted longest in our house.
Find two pinecones on a walk. Choose ones that are wide open — they have been drying in the sun.
Put one on a saucer on the windowsill and leave it. That one is your weather station.
Drop the second cone into a bowl of water and watch it over the next hour. The scales close as they take on moisture.
Lift it out, sit it on a towel, and put it in the sun. By tomorrow it will have opened again.
Rule a sheet of paper into a week and check the windowsill cone every morning: open, half, or closed.
Look out of the window at the same moment and draw the actual weather beside it. Compare at the end of the week.
Hang a cone outside on a string near a window if you want a version you can see from the breakfast table.
The effect is much stronger with a fully dried cone, so start with one that has been indoors for a few days. If nothing seems to happen, your house is probably very dry — hang one outside instead, where the humidity actually changes.