Weather 2. More color fun.

I love the 'Rainbow Milk' experiment. The effects are immediate and fascinating, plus it is an ever-changing kaleidoscope.

simple ingredients for a complex effect

All you need is milk - we made this a variable by trying whole, 2% and skim -,  Dawn dish detergent (an essential part of every science cupboard), food color and a Q tip. I used the three primary food colors (R, B and Y), to get the best variety of hues.

Pour the milk into a shallow dish and add a drop of each food color at the edge, each one being spaced at about 1/3 of the circumference. Dip a plain Q tip into the middle of the dish, is there any effect? Nope. Now have the kids put a drop of dawn on the Q tip and repeat - WOW!!!! The spots of color vanish and as you hold the Qtip in place, they reappear, swirling up from beneath and mixing to make all the secondary colors and more. Watching the dish is so rewarding as every few seconds another eddy of color pops up and twirls. After 10 seconds the Q tip is removed but the effects just keep going all lesson long!

soon after removing the Q tip

10 minutes later

At this point it is hard to start anything else, so, keeping the dish in the middle of the table, I got the children to make a 'color spinner' from a paper plate and markers. The children ask a lot of questions about the effects we are seeing in the milk. "What happens if you leave the Q tip in?", What if you swirl the milk up yourself?", "Where do the colors go when you put the Dawn in?", "Why?" The Dawn detergent breaks the surface tension of the milk molecules, which is the only thing holding the colors at the edge of the dish. The fat molecules in the milk (whole milk works best here) start to move around, pushing the color molecules every which way and producing the marvelous effects we see here.

The plate coloring for the spinners is encouraged to be 'scribble scrabble' - you would be amazed at how a lot of children cannot bring themselves to do that! Anyway, I put a toothpick in the middle of the finished plates and showed the children how to spin them - the original design and colors are blurred and often appear completely different as the pictures go past our eyes too fast to register on the brain. Once they got the knack of spinning the children were really enthusiastic - and impressed that the messier the plate, the better the effect!

making the color spinners

 

A really popular class lesson that takes on a life of its own!

rainbows and weather

Since almost every class I teach reports on the weather in their classroom, it makes a great introduction to this weather unit. When I ask 'What IS weather?', I get the weather report! "Sunny", "Cold", Raining","Windy", and so on. Why do we need to know what the weather is like? Well, wearing the right clothes is important for them, but I decided to show them how weather predictions can save lives, not just make us comfortable. Weather can be scary stuff so I started with the book 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' by Judi Barrett.


We then read a weather book about rainbows. This generated a lot of interest, the children telling me where and when, and if, they had ever seen a real rainbow, i.e. a weather-related one arcing across the sky. Some children had witnessed one from an airplane window, another child reported seeing them when they played in the sprinkler on a sunny day. I gave each child a triangular prism and they looked through these to try and see rainbows around the edge of the fluorescent lights. I then shone a flashlight through the prism to get a rainbow effect on a piece of white paper beneath. This was not as successful as I had planned, so I substituted 'rainbow viewers'.

here's lookin at you...

These are colored discs that look like the colored irises in our eyes, but instead of a black pupil there was an etched piece of plastic that refracted the light around any object they looked at - these were wildly successful. Even the 2's could use them.

Most of the children could identify some rainbow hues, many correctly and in order. We tried to sort pompoms  into rainbow order. One of the students found a unique way to do this with  markers.

rainbow pompoms

cool way to arrange markers in rainbow order

Finally the children drew a rainbow for their journals. Sounds easy but actually getting the arch right is a real fine motor skill, hence the freeform nature that resulted - but who cares when the colors are so wonderful!

Penguin Bowling

Who doesn't love penguins! Their images are everywhere, from the egg-caring Daddy Emperor to the crazy-haired Macaroni, and the combination of funny walks and survival under extreme weather conditions makes for great press!

Emperor penguin family

I got the children to tell me what they know about penguins - habitat, food, egg behavior, different species etc. The range of habitat surprised them, it's not just the South Pole! They knew a lot about certain penguins from movies which impressed me, but almost all of them believed the egg was cared for by the Dad, whereas it is only the Emperor that does this exclusively. Dads have a lot more 'padding' which makes them more tolerant of the long periods without food or movement on the ice than Moms. This piece of information generated conversations about whose Dad had his own padding - the honesty of preschoolers is eye-opening!

2 great books about penguins and eggs

We read these books  to learn more - the chicken Life Cycle book made a great comparison item - flightless birds and their eggs can be so different yet in many ways the same.

We finished by going Penguin Bowling! I glued photographs of different penguin species to bowling pins and set them up like a real bowling alley. Our bowling ball was a plastic egg! This activity was a huge hit. Many of the children have been bowling already and we had some impressive scores!

bowling pin penguins

the bowling alley

Wait time was alleviated by offering coloring activities, this offset the excitement of the game. The pictures they made can go into their journals!

creating a new penguin color scheme!

Food murals

The culmination of our previous investigations into food origins was to create a mural whereby pictures of food - raw food, not recipes- were pasted to one of four  backgrounds. An orchard, a vegetable farm, an animal farm and an ocean or river.

making an orchard

The students first had to engage in some research, finding appropriate pictures of food from magazines, and deciding which of the four origins they belonged to. They rapidly picked up that cookies and pizza were combinations of food, but that eggs, sugar, flour, tomatoes and cheese, some of the components of these favorite foods, these were the pictures we were looking for.

adding fruit to our orchard trees and bushes

meat and dairy farm foods

glueing food onto our ocean background

Next, each class painted a mural of one of the scenes, their choice (I had to talk some of them into oceans however, for some reason that seemed less exciting and certainly the plainest picture - blue blue blue!) and everyone cooperated. We cut out some tree trunks, suns, leaves, farmhouses etc and glued those on.

Finally, as many food pictures as could fit were glued onto the right scene, and don't they look fantastic! Our classroom looks like an Eden-like world of plenty now, and what fun everyone had doing it!

Our food mural - land-based farming

the artists survey their mural

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