Saturday, January 22, 2011

Temperature experiments

It was great doing a few mini experiments this week, and the girls performed a few more at their Brownies meeting for the Science Investigator badge. It reminded me how much children love experiments, and I must really incorporate more in.

This was a bit of a "trick your body" experiment, but it also shows how the body's thermometer is more of a relative gauge of temperature, ie if you walked into a room from outside in the freezing cold it would feel warm, but if you came into the same room after having a warm shower the same room would feel cold.

Arrange three bowls of water, one with very warm water, one with very cold water and one with room temp water. Put one hand in the cold water and one hand in the warm water. Hold it there a minute. Put both hands in the room temp water, and your two hands will send you very mixed messages on the temperature.
Ciara getting in there too.
The next was creating a mini watercycle. Place room temp water in a jar, place cling film on the top and top of with ice(we used an icepack). Place water near a heat source(signifying the sun), which will cause the water to turn into water vapour. This water vapour will come into contact with the ice(cool air high in the sky) and turn to droplets(like the clouds), after a while the droplets become heavy enough to drop back down again like the rain.