Weather Experiments for Littles

[Kate CA]

I am leading a co-op on weather and I want something hands-on for our discussion on tornadoes, blizzards, and hurricanes. Obviously I cannot deliver the real deal so I want to do something that will help tie in the information I will be presenting. Do you have anything that would be a good suggestion for this kind of thing? We have young ones - K-2.

Thank you!

Warmly,
Kate

[karensk]

...when my kids were 3 & 6 y/o, about 6 to 8 weeks long with experiments, homemade weather instruments, & hands-on activities. Each child made a weather notebook using a white blank binder and dividers for each of the 6 units, plus a section for the weather chart (to record daily weather data).

One of the experiments/demonstrations we did was with the tornado bottle made w/2 soda bottles & blue-colored water. We talked about how cold air is heavier than hot air, so generally, cold air sinks to the bottom and hot air rises to the top. But sometimes, you have a situation where there's a mass of cold air sitting on top of a mass of hot air. This is comparable to the tornado bottle flipped quickly upside-down, with the water on top; the water stays in the upper bottle (except for a few drips) and the air stays in the lower bottle. So, that air in the lower bottle (which represents the hot air mass) is kind of trapped beneath the water in the upper bottle (which represents cold air mass) -- this is an unstable condition.

If you create a path for the air in the lower bottle to move up into the upper bottle (by giving the bottle a little swirl), then the two elements are able to switch places. Their switching places is the tornado (hot air mass moving up, and cold air mass moving down).

Other things we did:

Use a prism to make a rainbow
Learn about evaporation using food-colored-ice cubes on a hot, sunny day
Make a paper propeller that you balance on a pencil point to demonstrate convection (hot air rising -- from your hand that's holding the pencil)
Make a "cloud" in a large glass jar using ice & hot water
Make a rain gauge
Make a very simple anemometer & weather vane
Tried to make a barometer (but didn't seem to work)
Record weather conditions on a chart I made in Word -- 3x/day (7am,2pm,7pm)


I used the Wild Goose weather experiment kit plus a few other resources.

HTH!

[Carol in Cal.]

It might be a little too advanced for a 5 year old, though.

You take a one pint canning jar, fill it half full with water, and add some red food coloring so that it is quite red. Then you put it in the freezer until it is quite cold and slushy, but not hard.

So you have already talked about how when water boils it is turning into a vapor, and that more vapor can 'fit' into hot air than into cold air.

You boil water in a tea kettle. Hold the canning jar with tongs up in the steam, to the side of the tea kettle, with a drip pan under it. What happens? Water condenses on the sides of the jar and drips down onto the pan. Why does it do this? Because the cold sides of the jar make the air colder nearby, and make it unable to hold as much vapor as the hot air near the tea kettle can. How do you know that the water comes from the tea kettle and not from the jar? Because it is clear in color, not red.

HTH!

[hsm]

a couple of thoughts. How about Barbra Taylor's Earth book Here's some lesson plans that are already made up (http://materamabilis.org/earthstudies.html) and Van Cleve's Weather/geography. Also look at any book of science experiments you have around--barometer, weather vane, cloud study(Tomie dePaola cloud book), wind speed, tracking daily weather via internet resources , we made mini storms via simple kitchen experiments..have fun