Thunder and Lightning!

We explored weather at the library in the latest Messy Fingers program and I thought I would share some of the things we did so you can join us!  All of these are fun, easy activities to introduce weather to your preschooler.

Rain - We put boiling water into a glass jar and then a plate on top. This made a cloud. Then we put ice on the top of the plate and this cooled the cloud and water began to drip down the sides making rain.

Lightning - We tried the old trick of biting wintergreen lifesavers but this time it didn't work. Normally when you bite down hard on anything with sugar it emits light - cool right?  However this light isn't in our visible spectrum, it is ultraviolet. Wintergreen oil changes the frequency of the light making it visible to the human eye. What we found is that most wintergreen flavored candy don't have wintergreen oil or not enough to make the sparks visible.  If anyone has a source for wintergreen life savers in rolls that are not artificially flavored, please let me know.

Thunder - We made our own thunderstorm by rubbing our hands, clapping, stomping and snapping our fingers. This is amazing in a very large group and was a lot of fun in our small group.

Photo: about.com

Wind - We made classic pinwheels to find the wind. Using 8.5in squares of paper, we folded them twice corner to corner to make an X on the page. The we cut almost to the middle of the paper along the lines we made. Using a hole punch we made one hole on each flap and then threaded the flaps on a push pin. We put the pushpin into nifty color change pencil's erasers.