How 'bout that Weather? Part 1

(Monday)
I woke up this morning and told my husband, "Pretty sure we'll do some weather stuff this week since it's supposed to rain and hail. Tamarin has been asking about it since last week's storms went through." That's when we got this gorgeous picture at Mimi's house.

I figured we'd just have a play day today so I could search the web for ideas. I jump on pinterest and to my surprise and pleasure, my sister got the same idea today :) She had pinned five weather unit sites saving me the time and effort! Yeah! The joys of having multiple family members homeschooling their children. Thanks, Rach!

Speaking of pinterest, want to follow me?
6 Monkeys in the Country

So, we were able to dive right in. We played outside for a while and I quizzed the girls on what the weather was like. I printed the weather watching graph for April and the weather poems from this site. I bookmarked this site, I think this will be incredibly useful in the future. I had Tamarin copy one of the poems and we started our graph. I printed one for morning observation and one for evening.

(Tuesday)
We talked about the water cycle and how this is a natural way water gets purified. We defined evaporation, condensation and precipitation. I downloaded this water cycle cut and paste and we used some of our big drawing paper which always gets them excited :)

I boiled some water on the stove so they could watch the water evaporate. Once hot I poured it into some mason jars, popped the lid on fast and they watched the water condense on the sides of the jars. It s l o w l y collected enough to run down the sides. To speed up the process I grabbed some bags of frozen pecans to set on top. The neat thing is the girls got to also feel the water in the air condense on the outside of the pecan bag :)

Then we did this example of how clouds have to get heavy with water before they release rain.

This is so simple, a container full of water, white shaving cream on top and then some dyed water. We started adding blue water a little bit at a time and eventually out came the rain. If you can't tell this was hilarious. So is Lemur mish mashing the three words into one when I ask about our water cycle words. Tamarin caught on fast. We will see if she retains them all by morning :) I got the shaving cream cloud experiment from this site.

I was told that my How to Bake an Apple Pie and See the World post was a bit heavy (Sorry!), so I'm going to split our weather week into two posts :) I figure just in case we get blown away by a tornado tonight I'd post part one now instead of later.