Rain Experiment

Rain, rain go away, come again another day… Actually, could you stay for a little bit? Maybe just this week while we do an absolutely awesome rainfall experiment with our primary school children? Thanks.

So what is this rainfall experiment? Well, it is a wonderful way to teach children a whole variety of things! Science, maths and even art all come into play here! The idea of the experiment is to measure the amount of rainfall over a week long period. See if it rises, falls, or even just stays the same. Let’s show you how we do this…

You will need a cup, or even 2 (in case the dog knocks it over), a ruler, a pen, paper and a lovely week of rain! Grab your plastic cup and mark some cm all the way from the bottom of the cup to the top (you might need sticky labels for this). Set it somewhere open, where it hopefully can’t be knocked down, and simply wait. Every day, at the same time, pop outside and see if the cup has caught any rain. Then, try to measure the rainfall, as best as you can, before plotting it in a table, then transcribing it onto a graph! Easy, right? Let’s show you what to do…

This relates to the Primary National Curriculum in a multitude of ways, especially in the year 3 and 4 learning objectives. For example, it states that children should set up simple practical enquiries, comparative and fair tests, which this certainly does!

Remember, no data is okay... you get barely any results? Okay, discuss why. You get a lots of different results? Great! Tell me about that. You knock the cup over… yeah, start again next week.

So release your inner scientist and get experimenting!