hands & heart learning: Exploring Rain

I have a couple of rain sticks that I have been using in class recently. When we first started using them, one student asked if it was really raining inside my stick. As I often do with questions like that, I asked "What do you think?" The kids had some cute ideas about what could be inside the rain stick, but ultimately they came to the conclusion that it must be something small. One student decided it was probably beans. I think kids often learn more from thinking through a question and listening to other people's ideas than when I just explain something and move on, and so I love it when conversations come up like this naturally.

I also love it when I can adapt my planning to match their interests, and did some research about how to make rain sticks. This is my first time attempting this project, so I was learning right along with the kids. Traditionally, a rain stick would be made using some sort of tube and then nails or sticks. But some have also tried using aluminum foil and that seemed a little more manageable for my purposes. So we all did the fine motor work of twisting and smashing the foil to make curvy snakes.

One thing I learned as we did this was that you might need to adapt the thickness of your foil snakes, depending on the size of cardboard tube. Some of the tubes I had were thinner, and they probably would have turned out better if the foil snakes were a bit thinner as well. But in preschool we are all about the process, and the students worked hard to fit their snakes inside their tubes regardless.

Then I helped to get a bottom secured on their tube using colored duct tape, and the filling began. We started out only using beans, and then later added rice. A couple students would fill their tube, shake it a little to listen to the sounds, dump it all out, and start all over again. Like I said, we are all about the process around here. :)

Everyone's stick turned out differently. We spent some time listening to each other's sticks and talking about the different sounds. The ones with mostly rice were much more quiet than the ones with mostly beans. We also had fun making our own rainstorm and dancing with the sticks.

To extend this activity, we spent some time exploring rain in other ways as well. I have seen pictures of this activity all over the internet, and I wanted to use it to show how rain water accumulates in the clouds and then falls down to the earth. This is really simple, using only water, shaving cream, and food coloring...but I totally forgot to add some water to the food coloring before putting it onto the cloud, so at first it didn't do much for us. But it was an easy fix, and the kids loved squirting water into the cloud after we had already done the food coloring.