Learning about Rain

I was going to do a number theme this week since last week we learned about letters, but the wet Miami summers changed my plans. What better way to learn about rain than when its raining outside. Hopefully the weather will cooperate with me. Here is my plan for this week and we'll see what happens.

Music: Singing in the Rain. My kids are obsessed with this clip. We also sang "If all the Raindrops Were Lemon drops and Gumdrops"
Film: Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood - A Stormy Night (available on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime).
Activity: Rain science experiment. Like this one from Pinterest Requires water, shaving cream, and food coloring
Book: Rain! - Linda Ashman; Come On, Rain! - Karen Hesse
Art: Watercolors and rain. The rain didn't cooperate with us so we will have to go back and finish this. You have the kids paint with watercolors and then put the paper out in the rain to see what the rain will do.




This week did not go as smoothly as last week. Our science experiments did not go as planned and the rain did not cooperate with our art activity. Oh well, that's the way life goes. The kids did enjoy learning and talking about rain which is the point, so in that sense, it was successful

                      

I read a couple reviews of books on rain and these two stuck out to me. I really lucked out that our library had them in stock. Rain! is a funny book with simple sentence structures. The two main characters are a grumpy old man and a happy-go-lucky kid. My husband joked that the old man uses soft curse words like "blasted" and "dang". There are many scenes in the book with no words where the kids have to look at their body language to figure out what's happening. That was a great time to ask questions like "Do you think he's happy or sad?" or "What is the boy doing in this picture?". By the end of the week, my son could read/recite the whole story. Come On, Rain! is a book for older kids. There is a lot of text so sometimes my kids would lose interest because I kept talking without changing the page but it is a nice and calming story. What I liked about both of the books is that they take place in cities and the characters are multicultural. Win-Win for this mommy.

Explaining the rain process was more difficult than I thought. I quickly realized that I should have done my homework. The experiment we tried first were a simple one with shaving cream and food coloring. I thought I had shaving cream but turns out it was shaving gel, which made this a challenge. I had to rub the gel in my hand and then scrape it into the bowl of water. Our cloud ended up being pretty small so the "rain" (food coloring) quickly went through. This was also confusing for the kids since we just discussed the rain cycle. They were expecting the water to get sucked up into the shaving cream and then come back down out of it. So it was not scientifically accurate. We tried it again a couple days later with real shaving cream and that was much easier though it took much longer for the dye to go through.

             

Rain attempt #1

              

Rain attempt #2