S16: Blog 9: Make it Rain

Recently in science, we’ve been learning all about weather. This means we’ve done everything from going outside to see what the temperature is to making our own wind socks. Today, we began to learn about clouds.

When my CT asked me a few weeks ago to try to find some fun experiments we could do with our students on a day like today, a Thursday before a three day weekend, I turned to Pinterest for inspiration. I happened upon a picture very much like the one you can see at the top of this page and a link to a mom’s blog. This blog described how you can use water, shaving cream, and food coloring to demonstrate how rain falls out of clouds. I was hooked in by the beautiful colors created and knew this was something my students would love to do. I also knew it tied perfectly to part of the unit that discusses clouds and rain.

I went on a three store shopping spree to gather the needed supplies. I was able to find glasses, shaving cream, and plastic cups for the colored water at the dollar store. I found four colors of food coloring at Target and hit the eye-care section of Walgreens to obtain eye-droppers. I got enough supplies so that I would be able to do a class demonstration of how the experiment works and so that each table group of students would get to have their own cloud to color and watch rain.

Before beginning my demonstration, I read two pages from our science textbook to the students. These pages named four different kinds of clouds and talked about how some clouds produce rain, while others don’t. The pages also discussed how it isn’t always rain that falls from clouds, that snow can too when it’s very cold.

To demonstrate, I filled a glass a little over half-way full with water, all the while talking to the students about how this was a real glass and therefore breakable so when they got their own they weren’t allowed to move them off the table. Next, I filled four smaller, plastic cups with water and put a different color of food dye in each: red, blue, green, and yellow. Then I put a mound of shaving cream on top of the glass. I asked my students what they thought the shaving cream was supposed to represent and they were able to correctly tell me “clouds.” I then began to use the eye dropper to put different colored drops on different parts of the cloud. As I added more and more of the colored water, it began to seep through the shaving cream and it began to “rain.” My students also were able to notice that it began to rain much faster when I put the drops near the edges of the glass, where there was less shaving cream, and that it took a long time for rain to appear when I put the drops in the puffy middle of the cloud.

During our lunch break, I put water in each of the five group’s glasses and also prepared the dyed water for each group. When the students got back to the room, I repeated the directions they were supposed to follow during the experiment. For example, they had to take turns using the eye-dropper and they weren’t allowed to pick up the glass or cups. I also gave them each a sticky note so they would be able to write down observations throughout their experiment.

As the students began experimenting, I was circulating around the room to look at their clouds and listen in on the observations they were making. I was pleased that not only did I hear words like rain in all their conversations but I also heard other weather words like “storm” and “hurricane” when a lot of dye had been added to the water and was beginning to make it murky. The students also noticed that mixing some of the colors created new colors, like how red and yellow make orange. Near the end of the experiment I walked around to each group and poured a large amount of one color of dyed water onto each of the clouds, so that students were able to discover what “pouring rain” looks like.

I was pleased with the observations my students made throughout the experiment and feel as if they now better understand the phenomenon of rain. They were also very engaged throughout the whole lesson and instances of fighting over whose turn it was to use the eye-dropper were rare. One thing I would do if I were to do this experiment again, would be to make some kind of vocabulary sheet with words like clouds, rain, pouring, etc. on it so that students could have guiding words to use in their discussions. They could also create illustrations for these vocabulary words based on what they saw during their experiment.

Addresses FEAPS 1 a and 3 a, b, and i

#EDE4942 #FEAPS1A #FEAPS3A #FEAPS3B #FEAPS3I