Clouds all around us - The STEM Discovery Campaign BlogThe STEM Discovery Campaign Blog

In the week between April 25th and April 29th we participated in the competition “Look Up-Cloud Hunters”, more on that in the next links.

http://globe.hr/natjecanje-look-up-cloud-hunters-%F0%9F%91%80/

https://sites.google.com/view/projektglobeprogramelementary/home-page?authuser=0

My group of students is in between 3 and 7 years old and we started project with talking about clouds.

What are clouds? How do they form? What is their purpose? What kind of clouds are there? Some of the answers were: “Cloud is one big thing that flies above the sky and makes the rain” (5), “It makes the rain and flies slow on the sky” (6), “Some of them are smaller so they are faster. Clouds are white thing above our heads and they are very nice to see, especially if they come in the shape od different things” (6), “Cloud is a steam and it makes the rain” (5), “There are big, small, white, gray and black clouds, if you see a black cloud there will be storm” (5).

After brainstorming what we know about the clouds we read the story “Kako nastaje oblak” (“How cloud is form”). This made the children talk more about the clouds and with that high interes about the topic we made a cloud in the bottle. In this experiment they observed the colour and the density of the cloud, if we pressed the bottle cloud was thiner and when we let go of it the cloud was thicker again. All we needed was plastic bottle with the cap, hot water and the match.

After that we went outside and observed clouds in the sky above us, we made Cloud observation in the GLOBE application, took the picture for the competition and took a look through “our magic window” which has different types of clouds around it and through it you could look up at the sky and compare what you see in the sky with the cloud around it. After we went back to the classroom to draw “our perfect cloud”.

Besides we made the cloud out of polyurethane foam and the rain out of paper on which they drew and coloured rain drops and then they cut them off. Now we have rainy cloud above our little garden in the classroom.

In our classroom we have Cinema day, this time we’ve watched short movie about clouds and rain.

Second experiment that we did was to see how many drops it needs to be in the cloud for it to start raining, so we made a cloud in the jar with shaving cream and we used coloured water for the “rain drops”. Children made conclusion that “The big clouds need more water drops and because of that it rains more from them” (5, 6)

The last experiment was to determine what would keep us dry if it starts to rain. Children said that the raincoat and umbrella are made of plastic and that keeps us dry, so we tested tissue paper, aluminium foil and cardboard. Conclusion was that the foil would keep us dry while tissue paper would not, and cardboard would probably keep us dry for a little bit because it absorbs all the water.