Joplin was talking about the clouds holding water until it rains the other day, and I remembered seeing a cool 'cloud jar' experiment floating around on the internet that would be a great way to look at the principals of clouds and rain!
The bath foam was the cloud floating on the water 'sky'. Joplin slowly dropped coloured water onto the clouds to see how much water the clouds could hold before it started to 'rain'!
Eventually the clouds became too heavy and it started 'raining'!
After we had exhausted the possibilities of the cloud experiment I thought I'd use the coloured water to show the different densities of liquids with oil. Joplin was fascinated with the way they didn't mix together like juice does. We dropped in a Milton tablet to give off some bubbles and it was great to see the different way they passed through the water as opposed to the oil.
He led the experiment from here and wanted to stir it up to see what happened. The whirlwind effect was great and Joplin was fascinated with the way the liquids went back to being separate after the stirring. We talked about how oil is lighter or less dense than water and so it floats. We also talked about how the whirlwind was like a tornado as we watched the Wizard of Oz at Christmas and he liked that bit!
Joplin wanted to add more colouring at this point and it behaved in quite a different way in the oil than the water keeping it's droplet form and clinging to the top of the oil before it fell.
He wanted to add more so we thought we'd see what happened when we added milk! It was pretty cool as it first went in seeming to cling down just the sides of the jug as it dropped, but quickly mixed in leaving a pretty murky mess - especially after another good stir!
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