Thursday morning, Sunrise Elementary School fifth-grade students knew the winds from the storm the night before averaged 44 mph, the highest for November thus far, and had subsided to between 4 and 11 mph by the time they hit the classroom.

The temperature around 9 a.m. Thursday was 47 degrees with 97 percent humidity and .08 inches of registered rainfall.

There it was at Cannon Stringer, Isaac Rose, Allie McPhee and Matt Green’s finger tips.

Each morning before school starts a pair of Sunrise students gather the information and post it in the hallway for classmates.

The information comes from neighboring Enumclaw Middle School, which has had a weather station for a number of years. The program is part of WeatherBug Achieve Program and is in partnership with KING5 First Alert Weather.

It was less expensive for Sunrise Elementary School to tap into the EMS station than to purchase their own. In the past year or two, through some generous donations, Sunrise purchased the a lifetime subscription to use the EMS site.

“It’s been a great addition,” Principal Chris Beals said.

“It’s a fun way to get into the weather. It puts it on the kids’ radar screen, so to speak,” he smiled.

Beals said a couple of students are trained at the beginning of the school year and then they in turn train the next group. By year’s end, every fifth-grade student should have a turn at posting the weather.

“Truly, the kids have taken it on, they’ve become quite independent,” Beals said.

Each morning the students pull the day’s current information, and also the prior day’s to compare predictions with the actual report.

Thursday McPhee recorded, neatly, the data on the board in a busy school hallway so everyone can check it out, while Stringer put stickers on the map of the United States. He put the sticker with a cloud and a lot of rain drops over Washington.

Green and Rose explained Thursday, the Pacific Northwest was the featured area of the country in the school’s on-line report. Recently it was Texas, due to tornadoes there, and Florida, because of a hurricane. There was also a flood alert for the Pacific Northwest.

“We’re having the most intense weather,” Green said.

McPhee and Stringer said there’s been “weird weather” lately, with the tornados in the Plateau area, early snowfall in the mountains and wind and rain.

Rose said he is ready for snow.

Beals said the snowflake sticker was worn out after last year.

So far, in November, there has been 1-1/2 inches of rainfall.

“I check it out at home,” Stringer said. He doesn’t just look at the local weather, Stringer recently checked out the weather before taking an out-of-state trip. Students are also able to view live weather feeds from across the country.

It’s not just at students’ fingertips, the community can log on and get the same information at anytime by going to achieve.weatherbug.com, then click on “enter the classroom,” enter your zip code and then select Sunrise Elementary and a grade level.

The community is able to access data on wind speed and direction, dew point, sunrise and sunset times, daily and to-date rainfall and the forecast on a weather map.

An added bonus, Beals said he and teachers have discovered is it’s not just science and how to use technology the kids are learning – it’s math.

The Web site gives the students information in a decimal format that needs to be rounded. It also uses symbols for degrees and inches that some students are not familiar. Students can also graph the information, examine patterns and make comparisons.

“There’s a lot of learning that’s imbedded and they’re using it in a natural way, which is best way to learn,” Beals said.