Clouds and Rain

We had a good week back this week, talking about clouds and rain. It was great to see everyone again! We don't have the snow and ice that we would usually be talking about in January, but it was fun all the same, and we were able to do a lot of water play outside and spent one entire day in the forest, which is kind of special for this time of year.

We did a lot of talking this week about where clouds come from and what they actually are. On Tuesday we read "Little Cloud" by Eric Carle, and used sponges to soak up some water from a "lake" and carry it to another place and "rain" it down.

We talked about "evaporation." We also read and discussed Cloudette, a sweet little story sort of about a cloud, and more about empowerment and self acceptance. We had some great sensory play with "cloud dough" which Grandma Bonnie made for us.

On Wednesday we spent the whole day at the forest, and had lots of fun games in our familiar woods.

We played with basters in several puddles and did a lot of exploration of suction and erosion.

We read Clouds, a nonfiction book about the science of clouds and the different types of clouds. There were lots of good vocabulary words in there like condensation, cumulus, cirrus and stratus. We made some "pictures" with pretend clouds on a blue background and took turns guessing what they were. There were dragons, mermaids, diggers, birthday cakes and more. It was fun!

On Thursday we acted out the water cycle and were water droplets flowing through the sky and earth. We also made "cloud cookies", aka meringues, which are not super easy to make and came out pretty good! We used a lot of egg whites and each child took a turn to separate the white and the yolk. It was delicate work and they were very serious about it.

We then read It Looked Like Spilt Milk, a lovely design book about cloud shapes and negative space, and we made some cloud pictures with cotton fluff glued onto dark blue paper.