As we were getting ready for bed last night, a fluffy, beautiful, Christmas-type snow started falling. We immediately thought of a science experiment. Okay, okay, I actually thought of putting the children down for bed, and snuggling with the Man of House, with nice cup of hot chocolate, while watching the snow come down outside, with Bing Crosby's White Christmas playing in the background - but first, we managed some science.
Our thought was, wouldn't it be fun to put together a different sort of weather station, one, that would tell, roughly, the temperature, and amount of snowfall through the night, and also provide for a fun, breakfast treat. So, I give you...
...the popsicle weather station. We filled most of our popsicle molds with juice, and sat them out on the deck. In the morning, we'd know if it was below freezing (and then, we'd have yummy orange juice popsicles), and we could measure the snowfall by the amount of snow around the molds. And, as the snow, that fell into the open molds melted, we could also measure the moisture content of our snow.
It worked, of course, just slightly differently than we had planned.
I'm not sure if you can tell from the dark picture above, or not, but what we discovered this morning, was chilled, but definitely not frozen, orange juice...
...that felt to be about 38 degrees Fahrenheit (if you can trust the best guess of a 4 year old)...
...and, we had about 1/4 inch of rainfall, in our empty popsicle slot rain gauge.
I'll admit it was not quite the experiment I had in mind, but it was interesting, and it did make us more aware of the difficulties of weather prediction.
For more fun with science, check out this week's Science Sunday link-up, at Adventures of Mommydom.
It's great to be a homeschooler.
We watched some really fluffy, large clumps of snowflakes fall yesterday afternoon. My daughter enjoyed trying to catch them on her tongue. My son was taking a nap but sadly the big snowflakes had ended by the time he woke up.
ReplyDeleteI love it. What fun.
ReplyDeleteGreat! We are totally doing this. Thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteI have to work harder to think of cool science experiments like this. OR, I can just use your experiments; my kids won't know that I am not the mastermind behind them!
ReplyDeleteI hope you got to snuggle and enjoy that hot chocolate. I have a serious weakness for hot chocolate.
Let's see here I think our attempt at an experiment like this would have floated away with the flood waters. I don't know if we could ever manage an experiment like this.
ReplyDeleteMay not have been what you were trying for, but it seems pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm with Christy that kind of morning requires hot chocolate.