For the last few weeks it has been raining off and on here and my ever-curious daughter, Briana asked me while driving home from school one day what makes rain. I tell her that rain comes from when water on the ground like in lakes gets hot and floats up into the sky. That’s called evaporation. The floating water is called water vapor. Then if the water vapor gets really cold, it will stick together and turn into a cloud. That’s called condensation. If the cloud gets warm then it will evaporate again and the cloud will go away and there will be a nice clear sky. If the cloud gets cold with all of that water in it, it will get heavy and turn back into water and fall back onto the ground as rain. That’s called precipitation. If it gets really, really cold then the rain turns into snow. Then all of the rain on the ground forms lakes and oceans and that’s called collection. So a cloud is really just a lot of tiny drops of water waiting to get hot and go away or get cold and turn into rain. For the most part that goes a little bit over their heads, but I persist because I know they can understand this if I try to show it to them so I just let the information soak in…pun intended. Then, of course it doesn’t rain for a week. The next Tuesday we get drenched and the questions about rain come up again.
“Do you remember what Mommy said causes the rain?” I ask. “It just falls down. No it gets too heavy and THEN it just falls down.” Bree answers. Good memory, kiddo!
Catching the Rain-
Before we can talk any more about rain, we need to get some. Since poor Abby seems to be catching a cold and is taking a long nap, I decide it’s probably best not to have her out playing in the rain so while Abby is napping Bree and I get our raincoats and galoshes on and we go outside. Bree loves jumping in the rain puddles and I sing a silly version of ‘Singing in the Rain’ that describes what we are doing “We’re stomping in the rain…just stomping in the rain….”. Briana loves to hear different ways of saying things so we spend some quality time stomping/stamping/pounding/trudging/marching in the rain. This reminds me that I need to find a new good book to read, as I too quickly run out of synonyms for walking around in the rain.
Before we go inside I tell Briana that we’re going to catch some of these raindrops so we can examine them inside. A science experiment proves a decent incentive for her to come in out of the rain. I pull out a shoebox lid that I had covered with about 2 inches flour. I hand the lid to Bree and she holds her lid out in the rain and catches some raindrops with it. I don’t let her hold it out for very long because we would have ended up with soaked flour and a failed experiment. Briana is pretty excited to see the wet spots where the rain fell into the flour, but there’s more to the experiment of course.
I have her bring her lid carefully into the house. She puts it on the table while we take off our coats and galoshes and I get a big bowl and a strainer. Together we pour our flour through the strainer into a bowl. The main reason for pouring it into a bowl is that we can collect the extra flour and do the experiment again if time and interest warrants it. The raindrops that are left in the strainer have been coated in flour so we can look at them. They look remarkably like Dippin’ Dots. I wonder if that’s where they got the idea. Probably not since I doubt that this is a very popular thing to do, but you never know. We marvel that the raindrops are so tiny and that there’s so many when we only held the lid out for a few seconds. We play with them for a while talking about the different sizes and talking about the water cycle again.
Demonstrating the Water Cycle-
I then draw out the water cycle in case Briana’s learning style is a visual one. I draw a rainy cloud with an arrow to a lake and an arrow coming out of the lake and into the sky with a non-rainy cloud and then an arrow from the non-rainy cloud to the rainy cloud. I explain it again without the fancy terminology. First the water is together. That’s like the water in this cup or in a lake. Then the water gets too hot so it flies into the air. It gets together with its water friends and they make a cloud and when too much water gets into the cloud, the water drops back to the ground in rain. Does that make sense? “Yeah, do it again but draw my head. The rain comes down on my head and THEN into the lake for the beach.” So I draw another version with Briana standing in the rain. I would show you a picture, but it’s more akin to a Pictionary masterpiece than a legible teaching tool. I.e. I think you would have to have been there to hear the description to understand the picture.
I debate doing a quick water cycle experiment. The easiest one that I know of is to put a big bowl with some water in it, and put an empty cup in the water. Seal the bowl with Saran Wrap (I like the Glad Press and Seal so it doesn’t spill.). Put the bowl by the window and wait until there are water droplets on the Wrap and water in the cup. Unfortunately I’m not sure that this will make any sense at all to the kids and it might take longer than my kid’s attention span will merit, so I drop that idea and decide to put on a play about the water cycle. We turn into little drops of water like we caught in the flour. We lay together on the floor like we’re in a lake. Then we get “too hot” so we fly around the room to cool off. Well, except that in my reality I’m not cooling off at all running around and around the kids’ ball pit. In fact I’m starting to feel some condensation on my forehead. But I stick to the imaginary world where we are cooling off water droplets. I grab Bree up in my arms and spin her around saying “we are condensing into clouds”. Then I say that raindrop Briana has gotten too heavy and she rains down on the playroom and collects on the floor/ lake. We act out the water cycle many times as Briana realizes that it’s much more fun for Mommy to be the sun, pulling her up out of the “lake” into a cloud and raining her back down than to have a Mommy raindrop friend. In the process, Abby wakes up and gets to play raindrop friend Abby for a while.
Making the Rainbow-
While we are lying on the floor/ lake, I ask the kids what they thinks causes a rainbow. “Crayons can.” is an accurate answer, but not the one I was looking for. “You’re right, crayons can make a rainbow, and so can the sun. A rainbow is made outside when the sun’s rays shine through a raindrop just right and the light is bent into many different colors. The big word for that is refraction.”
I then tell them that Mommy sun can make a rainbow. Follow me into the bathroom and I’ll show you. I grab a glass with some water in it, a little, flat, travel mirror, and a couple of flashlights and lead everyone into the bathroom. Incidentally, the reason we go into the bathroom is that the experiment works best if you are in a dark room with white walls. I fill the glass with a little bit of water and put the mirror in the cup, slanted upwards. I shine my flashlight onto the mirror a couple of times and adjust the angle of the mirror. There! A rainbow appears beautifully, albeit very thin, on the wall. The kids then take turns with their flashlights. The kids are mesmerized by how the mirror bends the light so we shine the flashlights through the water and see the light on the wall in front of us and then I put the mirror in our path and the light shows up on the wall behind us. Very simple, but I must admit that I was having as much fun as the kids making the rainbow and bending the light.
I’ll be cooking and stuffing my face next week, so there won’t be a blog. I’ll be back to blogging the week of the 29th. Everyone have a very Happy Thanksgiving!!
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