Weather Tools

Our study with weather continued today as the kids started drawing what they thought the weather would look like. 

"I'm making the rain by mixing all of the colors! It's a storm! The blue is the clouds. They are so big."

"I drew happy and sad rain drops. They are made up of molecules!"

"This is the best planet because it has hot, cold, and warm. It's planet earth. You'll freeze to death on Uranus, you need like 100 sweaters! Mars is really hot. There are volcanoes!"

F was hard at work drawing a sun. He chose yellow and began making big circles across the shiny foil. 

"This is the rain. I am making the dots because it's thunder. It's next to the rain and the clouds. I couldn't find white to make the clouds so I made them blue because it's raining."

After drawing for awhile a few asked if there was another way we could show the rain. Because it wasn't raining outside, they decided to do it themselves. 

"This is going really slow with this."

"Look it's coming out so fast."

"It's like it's raining really hard!"

"The water is coming so slow out of this. It's taking forever to drip out."

After a few minutes of experimenting with different tools to make our own rain, B noticed something on the ground he's never seen. 

"Look at this! Let's fill it up with water!"

"We can use these different things to try and fill it up."

"What is it?"

"I think it just stays in the garden."
"I don't know what it is, but it stays outside."

After a few minutes of wondering what the container was, we researched that it was a rain gauge. 

"What does a rain gauge do?"

"I think it has rain in it."

E tried filling it up with a medicine dispenser.

"It comes out really fast! I think I can fill it up using this." 

V used a squirt bottle to try and fill the gauge.

"You can squirt it so fast with it."

"It has a lot of numbers on it."

"It goes all the way to 5!"

"Yeah it means that's 5 gallons of water."

After a few rounds of the three trying to fill the gauge, B was unsatisfied with the progress they were making. 

"This is taking forever. I want to fill it to the top. I am going to use all this water to fill it up!"

E & V agreed that it was taking too long using the small tools and allowed B to start pouring the water. 

"Look it's filling up!"
"That was easy. It filled up so fast."

"We should get more water and keep filling it up."

Our conversations about weather have continued to grow into different wonderings:

Do other planets have weather? If so, what does it look like? 

What do animals do when it's raining?
What do bugs do when it's raining?

Before returning to the classroom, B, V, & E noticed another kind of weather tool the have never seen before. Tomorrow we will explore this interesting looking device and try to find out what it does to tell us about the weather.