We spent one week learning about clouds and precipitation using Layers of Learning, year 2 unit 3. It was an extra fun (and a bit chaotic) day of school because Ani joined us for our experiments with the three-year-old she nannies and I was watching another three-year-old for a friend (the little girls got to take cotton ball clouds and coffee filter snowflakes home with them).

We used cotton balls to show how different clouds look and approximately where in the sky they appear.

We made a cloud in a bottle. We partially filled a 2-liter bottle with hot water and placed a bowl of ice on top. When the hot water vapor rose to the top, it collided with cold air from the ice creating a cloud.

We learned about the water cycle.

We made rain. We held a bowl of ice over a pot of boiling water. The steam condensed on the bowl into water which fell back into the pot like rain.

We demonstraed Bernoulli’s Principle by blowing on paper.

We made snowflakes out of coffee filters.

We demonstrated what happens when cold and warm fronts collide. We added a few drops of red food coloring to hot water and dropped in a couple blue-dyed ice cubes. The cold blue water was sucked under the hot red water.