Fun experimenting with water
Evaporation experiment:
Half fill two bowls of water. Cover one with a saucer. Leave the other uncovered. Show the children what you have done during free play periods or during rings if you have time. Ask them to watch and see what happens. (The covered saucer will probably still have water in it at the end of the week. The uncovered one will be empty.)
Littering experiment:
Fill a bowl of water with some peels, tins, plastic bottle, styrofoam and any other litter. Over the week you can watch how these things make the water dirtier and dirtier. Ask the children if they want to drink that water at the end of the week? By littering we make sure that all sorts of rubbish goes into our water. Then the government has to spend lots of money to clean the water – and even then they cannot get all the toxins out. If we didn’t spend that money on cleaning up our water, perhaps there would be more money for Children’s Centres? And we would have water that is more naturally clean!
Absorption experiment:
Place the end of long piece of string or long piece of cloth into a glass of water. The string will become wet – right to the very end even though it is not in the water! You can add food colour to the water so that the children can watch the way that the string slowly changes colour.
Water siphoning:
You need plastic piping about half a metre long and quite thin. Show the children how you can put the pipe in the water, suck until the water is flowing and then put the end you sucked on into another container and it will continue flowing, even if the other container is higher than the first one. Wash the pipes often during the day or have a pipe for each child.
Condensation experiment:
Hold a plate over the steam coming out of a kettle. Feel the plate and look at it - the cold plate turned the hot steam back into water - which is what happens in our skies of course!
See what keeps the cold in best:
Wrap pieces of ice in different kinds of cloth, paper and plastic. Which piece of ice melts firsts? Put a piece of ice in the shade and in the sun. See what happens...