Wicked Pickles

Today we studied precipitation and the weather cycle.

I read Why Do We Have? Wind and Rain, Weather Patterns , On the Same Day in March: A Tour of the World's Weather, Can It Rain Cats and Dogs?: Questions and Answers About Weather (Question and Answer), and Weather Words and What They Mean aloud. There is nothing like snuggling together and reading.

Read pages 16-23 in Eyewitness Weather. Talked about the water cycle. Picklets worked on some vocabulary words pertaining to weather such as condensation and precipitation together. (They actually got along!)

Picklets made raindrops by taking mirrors that were in the freezer for an hour and breathing on them hard. The outcome was condensation that eventually became thick enough it dripped like a raindrop.

We made freezing rain. This was one of the favorites. Sweet picked a round rock from the rock garden and stuck it in the freezer. About an hour later we put it on a piece of waxed paper and the picklets took turns putting drops of water on the rock. The result: FREEZING RAIN!

We made a stove top water cycle. Freaken cool and just seeing what we have been talking about clicked for all three of them...it was awesome! We took 2 sauce pans, put one in the freezer and boiled water in the other. When the water was boiling the picklets took the frozen pot and held it over the boiling water and demonstrated the water cycle. Nothing like a fabricated cloud to explain the water cycle!

We saw how raindrops form. On a piece of waxed paper, the picklets dropped drops of water all over it. Then they picked up the waxed paper and tilted it to "form" bigger drops. This showed the difference in the size between the "drips" that are in the clouds and the "drops" that touch the ground.

Attempted to make a rainbow with the sun and a jar of water. It didn't work too well, though you can see some kind of color there.

We found the dew point by putting a thermometer in a glass of room temperature water. Ice cubes were added and stirred. We watched the glass until beads of water formed on the outside of the glass. We then read the thermometer and found the dew point was 40º.

We found the relative humidity with a homemade Psychrometer. We taped two thermometers to a cardboard box. One of the bulbs of the thermometer was wrapped with wet gauze. The picklets then pointed a fan on high to the thermometers. When the thermometers stopped dropping in temperature both thermometers were read. They then subtracted the wet on from the dry one and found the relative humidity on a chart. The relative humidity was: 62 .

While the fan was running and we were waiting for the temperature to stop falling it proved to be the perfect time to practice Darth Vader voices. Nothing like a good "Luke, I am your faaaather" to make learning fun!