Weather: Exploring Water's Forms and Making Rain

“Water in its various changing forms, liquid, gas, and solid, is an example of another overworked miracle-so common that we fail to see the miraculous in it.”

-Handbook of Nature Study, p. 808.

Looking at the various forms that water turns into is such a fun thing to explore. Start with ice in a pan. Discuss how the water molecules in ice are packed tightly together, and are hardly moving, causing it to be a solid. Put the pan on the stove and turn the burner under it on. As one adds energy to the water molecules with the heat of the stove, the molecules will began to move faster and pull apart, causing the solid ice to become liquid water. As you continued to heat it, the molecules will move faster and faster until they bumped each other out of the pan as water vapor, a gas. Hold a pizza pan with some ice cubes on it over the steam. The steam, or water vapor, as it hits the cold pizza pan, will cool down. You can see a mist coming from the pan, which will look like a cloud. The water vapor will then turn back into a liquid and drip down. You have just made rain!