If you’re a regular here, you know that we’ve been studying clouds lately.  We had so much fun with our earlier experiment, creating a cloud in a jar, that the kids couldn’t wait to make it rain with their very own shaving cream rain cloud the next day. 

Materials Needed to Create Shaving Cream Rain Cloud:

• Clear glass or jar
• Water
• Shaving cream
• Food coloring or liquid watercolors (Make your own watercolors!)
• Eye dropper

To create your cloud, fill your clear container partially with water.  (About half full worked well for us.)

Then spray your shaving cream “cloud” on top of the water.

Once your cloud is formed, use the eye dropper to drip your liquid watercolors (or food coloring) onto the cloud.  (This is a great opportunity to talk about how clouds can only hold so much liquid.  As water droplets bump together and get larger, they eventually get too heavy for the cloud and fall as rain.)

I asked the kids to predict how many drops their cloud would be able to hold before it “rained.”  Then they counted carefully to see if their predictions were right.

Eventually, we were able to see our own rain shower!

We had so much fun learning about clouds, I am sure the rest of our weather unit is sure to be a hit!

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This week, as we’ve been studying clouds, one of our favorite books has been It Looked Like Spilt Milk.  The book is full of repetition and simple pictures that look like ink blot images, and made this paint blot craft the perfect activity for the book.

I originally wanted to do this craft with white paint to look like the clouds in the book.  Unfortunately I discovered our white paint was all gone.

The kids didn’t seem to mind; fact, they enjoyed picking out other colors to create their paint blot “clouds.”

We simply folded the paper in half and used a paintbrush to paint on half of the paper.  By folding the paper halves together and pressing on them, we got some wonderful images.  (And a great chance to talk about symmetry!)

Once they dried we had fun coming up with what we saw in our “clouds.”

My son immediately saw 2 puppies in the picture above.  Can you see them?

This one we decided was a butterfly.

Sometimes it’s the simple crafts that they love the most!

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Looking for more books on clouds?

Here are a few more of our favorites!  (Amazon links are provided for your convenience!)

The Cloud Book by Tomie dePaola

Shapes in the Sky: A Book About Clouds by Josepha Sherman

Clouds (Weather Basics) by Erin Edison

The post Paint Blot Craft for It Looked Like Spilt Milk first appeared on There's Just One Mommy.

We’ve started a weather unit in homeschool, and this week we are focusing on clouds.  After reading about how clouds form, we decided to do our own experiment and make a cloud in a jar.  It was so much fun the kids begged to do it several times.

Ready to impress the kids this week?  Make your own cloud!

Materials Needed to Make a Cloud in a Jar:

• Clear glass jar with a lid
• Ice Cubes
• Hot Water
• Aerosol Spray (We used hairspray.)

To form your own cloud, pour an inch or two of very hot water (I microwaved a coffee mug full for 2 minutes.) into your empty jar.

Swirl the hot water around a bit to warm up the jar’s sides.

Next, place the jar’s lid over the opening, upside-down, and place several ice cubes on top of the lid.

Wait 30 seconds and then remove the lid and spray a quick spurt of your aerosol into the jar.  Quickly cover the jar and watch your cloud form!

It is really hard to see the cloud in the pictures, but, we took the lid off to “let our cloud free.”  This was my daughter’s favorite part!

So, why does it work?

For clouds to form, they need three things:

• warm, moist air   (provided by the hot water trapped inside the jar)
• cooling, which causes the moisture to lift (provided by the ice cubes)
• small particles in the air for the moisture to condense on (in our case it was hair spray, but usually it is dust, smoke, pollution…)

If you like this Cloud in a Jar experiment, you’ll also like:

• Make a Shaving Cream Rain Cloud
• Make a Wind Meter
• Make a Tornado in a Jar

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