In this activity you are learning about the weather and why it rains. Fundamental concepts but with a gorgeous, colorful, rainbow twist.
Rainbow activities are always fun as they make boring activities vibrant and exciting. So, with this activity, you could stick with a simple blue rain, but I wanted more excitement!
Plus, this activity leads to a lot of different investigations and critical thinking if you explore your curiosity, ask questions, and create your own variations of this activity to see what happens.
This is powerful learning.
For this activity you need:
A wide mouth jar, cup, vase or container. You can also do this in a series of cups, one for each color. The only requirement is that the containers are clear so you can see what is happening.
Water
Food Coloring – Water based in the squeezable droppers is easiest, but you can adapt to any type.
Shaving Cream
Directions
Start by filling your container about about 3/4 full with water.
Add shaving cream at the top to create the cloud.
Now add the food coloring by dropping it onto your cloud.
Watch for your rainbow rain to start falling as your clouds fill with liquid.
Shaving Cream Rain Cloud Science
Clouds are formed from water vapor that forms into droplets in the sky. These droplets gather together, until they become so heavy that they fall down to the Earth as rain (or snow if it’s cold).
The rain falls due to gravity and is part of the water cycle.
In this experiment, the rain is the the food coloring which is a water based. As you add it to your shaving cream cloud, the cloud swells with liquid just like a cloud until it becomes so heavy it falls into our water below.
There is a second scientific phenomenon we can witness as our colorful rain mixes with our water, it is called diffusion. You can learn more about diffusion here.
Cloud in a Jar Extensions
Like any great experiment, you must ask questions to wonder, and to come up with new theories and experiments you can do to test your theories. This is part of the Scientific Method.
Here are a few separate experiment ideas you might want to investigate. How does water temperature affect the results? Remember that water concentration in clouds is what causes rain, so what if you increase the amount of water by diluting the food coloring? What might happen if you increase the density of the water in the jar by adding salt?
Rainbow Rain Experiment 2
For this rain cloud variation we needed some additional glasses to mix up our food coloring with water. We also need a way to add the colorful mixtures to our clouds like a syringe, but a pipette or even a spoon would work.
Conduct the experiment the same way you did, but this time with diluted food coloring mixes.
What do you notice about the clouds and the colors? are there any differences?
Such a cool result!
This simple experiment is so much fun and a great way to foster curiosity and fun with science. I hope you enjoyed it.
