Students learn more from introductory weather and climate courses when they can relate theoretical material to personal experience. The ubiquity of weather should make the link obvious but instructors can foster this connection with a variety of simple methods. Here we describe traditional and web-based techniques that encourage students to document daily weather observations and to explore the processes underlying their observations. Our methods employ weather journals, web-based graphics and interactive exercises, as well as a radio transmission system that provides Internet access to near real-time observations from a campus weather station.