Clouds and Rain Drops Experiment: An Easy Science Experiment for Kids

Clouds and Rain drops Experiment: Easy Science Experiment for Kids

In this post you will learn how to do the clouds and rain drops science experiment for kids with water, shaving cream, and food coloring. You can download the Clouds and Rain drops Experiment worksheet to go along with it.

Clouds and Rain Drops

This science experiment ties for first with Walking Rainbow for my kids favorite science experiments. It’s very interactive. The kids can do a lot of the work, and you can try different variables with it.

It’s also a great way to learn how clouds and rain work. It’s a great visual. We had to adjust the experiment a couple times to find the best way to make it work. I’ll share those below.

This is how we did it.

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Clouds and Rain drops Experiment

Supplies:

Food coloring
Vase (You just need a somewhat tall and wide container. A jar might be too small. A vase is just the right size. It has to be clear as well.)
Shaving cream (any ole’ shaving cream should do)
Syringe or eye droplets (or pipette) (you don’t NEED this, but it IS helpful)
Cups (We just used some disposable plastic cups)
You can also download the Clouds and Raindrops Experiment worksheet to make it more official. This worksheet simplifies the scientific method for young minds, and asks the right questions so they can learn what is really happening.

Instructions:

Fill a few cups half way with water. Place several drops of food coloring in each cup. You can do as many cups as you like, it just depends on how many colors you want. (You could just do one cup of blue, if you wanted). Make sure the water is heavily diluted with coloring. It shows up better in the vase.

Fill the vase about 2/3 of the way full of water.

Place a small mound of shaving cream on top of the water. I say small because if it’s too big, it takes a long time for the droplets to come through it. We did WAY too much at first.

This is way too much:

Using your syringe or pipette, suck up some of your colorful water and drop it on top of the shaving cream.

This amount of shaving cream was WAY better:

After a few minutes, you should start to see what looks like colored rain drops coming from the shaving cream. It also comes out in strands. It takes some time for it to start dripping down, but it is pretty cool.

If you don’t have a pipette or syringe, you can just drip the food coloring right in.

Other Rain Drop Experiment Fun

You can also try other things, like vegetable oil. Since it doesn’t mix with the water well, it turns out more like droplets and looks pretty cool.

After we did the experiment for a while, my kids wanted to just go crazy, so they started doing all kinds of drops. We ended up with a “dark cloud”. It was pretty neat, and we got to talk about weather and SEE it.

In case you need a crash course in 3^rd grade science, like me, here is some science behind clouds and weather:

Water is always moving; rain that’s fallen where you live may have been water in the ocean a couple of days before.

Water can be in the atmosphere, on land, in the ocean and even underground. It gets used over and over and over again through what is called the water cycle.

In this cycle, water changes from liquid, solid and gas (which is water vapor).

Water vapor then gets into the atmosphere through a process called evaporation.

This then turns the water that is at the top of oceans, rivers and lakes into water vapor in the atmosphere using energy from the sun. This vapor can also from snow and ice too.

The water vapor rises in the atmosphere and there it cools down and forms tiny water droplets through something called condensation.

These tiny droplets then turn into clouds.

When they all combine together, they grow bigger and are too heavy to stay up there in the air.

This is when they will fall to the ground as rain, or maybe snow or hail due to the force of gravity.