Science: Weather Unit

We just finished up an awesome unit on weather. (Thanks to the Magic School Bus Science Kit) It has been really fun, and it came at the perfect time, because we got some rainy and windy weather to co-operate with us so that our experiments did what they were supposed to. 

First we built a wind vane, so measure the direction the wind was blowing. It was actually really cool and really easy. Basically, you take a shish kabob stick and stick it in a ball of clay, they you cut out arrows for north, south, east, and west, and slide them over the stick. Then slide a drinking straw over top of that, and tape a big black arrow to the top. Then you put your N, S, E, W facing the right ways, and the wind will blow your giant arrow so you can see which way the wind is blowing.

My favorite experiment of the bunch was making a homemade thermometer. All you need to make this is an empty bottle filled to the top with colored water. Stick a drinking straw in there so that the bottom of it sits under the water about an inch.  Then take some clay and put it around the drinking straw and over the top of the bottle, so that it's air tight. Next put some boiling water in a container and some ice water in a container. Put the bottle in the hot water and see what happens (the colored water should go up the straw). Them move it over to the ice water and see what happens. (The water will go back down again.) It's really cool. My boys played with this for a really long time, and would have played longer, but they got the clay wet and then it wasn't air tight anymore and wouldn't work. 

And I made them do some writing about it...

We also made a rain catcher that caught about a half inch of water, even though we had good rain for two days. But that shows that even though you think it's raining a lot, it takes a long time to collect water in a small area. We probably would have caught more if the mouth of our rain catcher had been wider. 

And we made a barometer, to measure air pressure. The water in the cup was supposed to move up and down depending on the pressure in the air. We had a little trouble with ours, because it was so windy, the bottle on top kept blowing away.

 Another experiment the kids really enjoyed was making rain. We took a sponge to represent the air. Then we took a medicine dropper and dripped water on the sponge to show how the air holds water. When the air, or sponge, gets too full of water, it starts to rain out the bottom.

 As always, we included some great books in our weather unit. As well as the Magic School Bus Episode on weather. :)