- What comes out of the sky
- When the drops of water in a cloud become too heavy to float in the air, the fall to the earth. This is rain
- Snow is water vapor which condenses directly into ice crystals because the air high in the sky has cooled very quickly.
- Sleet is formed when rain freezes as it falls to earth.
- Hail is rain that the wind blows up in the sky where the air is colder. They freeze and start to fall again. Over and over they start to fall and are blown back up by the wind. Each time they start to fall a new layer of water condenses on them. Each time they are blown back up the new layer turns to ice. When the pieces of hail become too heavy for the wind to blow back up, they fall to earth. If you cut a hailstone in half, you may be able to see the layers.
- Fireworks in the sky
- "As water droplets are rubbed and pulled about, they are charged with electricity. Suddenly the electric charge in one part of a cloud is attracted to a charge in another part of the same cloud or in another cloud. As it shoots through the air, it causes the air to glow for an instant and we see a lightening flash." quoted from book
- Experiment: Try it with balloons in a dark room. Rub both balloons on your clothes or a piece of furniture, then bring them together so they almost touch. You should see a flash of light. (We could not get our balloons to work. They got very "static-y" and stuck to us, but we could not get them to "make lightening".)
- When the air is heated by the the electric charge, it expands rapidly, setting a giant air wave in motion. This is the thunder we hear. Sound takes about five seconds to travel one mile, so by counting you can tell about how far away the lightening strike was.
- The storm with an eye
- We read The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane by Joanna Cole. It has a lot of information in it, so depending on your child, don't read everything on each page.
- Rainbows
- Types of clouds
- Cumulus: puffy white clouds shaped like a dome on top and flat on the bottom
- Cirrus: high in the sky, feathery wisps of curly ice crystals
- Stratus: layers of cloud, spread flat across the sky
- Nimbus: dark gray rain clouds
- We "googled" cloud images and tried to identify some of the types of clouds.
- Experiment
- To show that hot air expands and cold air contracts
Put a balloon over the mouth of a bottle, set it in a pan of water and turn on the heat. (A smaller balloon or larger bottle would have been better.)
As the air in the bottle heats up, it expands and the balloon starts to fill with air.
This is as big as the balloon got, that's why I think a larger bottle, or smaller balloon would have been better.
After the bottle cooled off, I stuck it in the freezer. The cold air in the bottle contracted and sucked the balloon partly into the bottle.
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