Weather Unit: It's Raining, It's Pouring

We had a great time making it rain today!

We made clouds out of shaving cream, and added blue water to the clouds, when they would get too heavy the blue water would rain into the clear water below. Thanks, Teach Preschool for this idea!

We read the book, Once There Was a Raindrop

By Judith Anderson and Make Gordon
This book went perfectly with our activity.
It talks about the water cycle and shows it in action.

Then we made it rain on paper towels.
This was fun,
and great for their fine motor skills.
You can think of this as cross training for writing muscles.

For Baby H. I filled up a bottle with the food coloring water mixture.

He had a blast along with the girls,
and he didn't even attempt to drink out of the bottle. :)

They were having so much fun,
that I thought,
"Hey let's work on letter recognition."
So we worked on the letter Rr for Rain.

All I did was to write a letter R in permanent marker.
You could write it in washable marker, and it would make a fun smearing letter. I wanted to keep the letter visible, so I went w/ permanent. 

Then I wrote the word Rain all over the paper towel,
and they found the letter R.

Then, for the extra fun stuff.  I let them play in shaving cream,

as long as they kept it in the pie tin.

This part, made her really connect to clouds.

For the rest of the day she was looking up at the clouds,

and comparing them with shaving cream.

Then I gave them each a bottle,

and they squirted it on their cloud,

and sang about rain together the whole time!

It turned their fingers a little blue,

but it washed off by dinner time.

After we finished with the fun messy things,

we went into the bathroom and turned on the shower and watched the whole room steam up. This made the whole idea click with Miss Sweetie.  She could see how hot water turned into vapor,

and when we opened the door we could see the vapor rush out to join the clouds in the sky.

Here are some former posts that we did about the water cycle and states of matter:

Little Cloud

Where we made clouds out of shaving cream,

for the backgroud of our butterfly pictures.

Air, Water, and Ice

Where we filled beach balls with air, water, and ice.

Making Ice Cream

Where we saw how liquid changed to solid.

Ice Water Balloons

Where we froze water balloons, and had fun tossing them around.