Rainy Day Fun

This week our class has been learning about weather. In true Alabama fashion, our week started out beautiful, sunny, and warm and ended with cold rain (and even a flurry chance tomorrow!!).

After a night of storms and torrential rain, we had a delayed start for school. I wish I could say I got to catch up on some of the lost sleep from watching the live radar at 2 am but nope....schoolcast for my oldest daughter's school did not come through until 6 am...so I was already up and at it (with coffee in hand!!).

We did not let the rain dampen our fun in class! To wrap up the weather lessons we watched a quick video about the water cycle and then got our hands and minds moving with a fun rain experiment.

Like so many great ideas, I originally found this Rain Cloud in a Jar activity on Pinterest (funlearningforkids). This is the third time I've tried this and each time it works wonderfully!

The students have a cup of water. This represents any body of water like oceans or lakes. We then spray some shaving cream on top. This represents clouds (we also talked about What Clouds Are Made Of earlier in the week). Each student also had a pipette and a small bowl of blue liquid water color. The liquid watercolor was watered down a bit to make it go further. It represented water vapor that evaporates from the ocean or lakes.
Next came the fun part!! The students used the pipettes to draw up the "water vapor" and drop it on the cloud. As the cloud grew heavier it started dropping through the shaving cream on its way back to earth at rain. The kids loved it and had so much fun (and even a little messy ;)