Puddle Science for Kids

If there’s a puddle, most kids will gravitate toward it. A few kids will hold back but oftentimes that is because of fear of mom or dad’s wrath with wet or muddy clothes. Pull out some old, stained, or never-quite-right clothing from your child’s wardrobe and designate them outdoor play clothes if, as mom or dad (or the adult who hands kids off to mom and dad) you are concerned with seeing grass stains and mud across the knees of a pair of jeans.

Spring and summer are great times of year to explore puddles because the weather is warmer and there is less chance of getting chilled. Rain boots are perfect for splashing around; although, an old pair of sneakers is fine as well. Raincoats can be hot and some kids are happier without a coat – if they can go inside and change into dry clothing after time outside, then kids don’t have to deal with the restriction of not getting wet.

Some kids will go outside and feel right at home exploring and playing in puddles. If your child is weather-wary, join them outdoors and guide them through a few simple activities.

Water Activities
If it is raining, watch the way the drops interact with the surface. Children will learn to look outside on a rainy day and predict how hard it is rainy by watching droplets hit the puddles.

Try floating leaves on puddles. Children will see how the depth of water affects the way the leaf boats can move.

Gather a collection of dry twigs (or use craft sticks) and measure the depth of a few puddles. Can the children hypothesize why some puddles are deeper than others?

Splash! Toss different objects into puddles of different depths. What reaction can kids get from a leaf, an acorn, a pebble, or even themselves! Watch for splash patterns. Kids may even want to measure the depth of water in a puddle after they’ve jumped into it.

Encourage children to come up with their own experiments and games – perhaps they will trace the edge of a puddle and measure by the day or hour how quickly it takes to evaporate. If kids haven’t spent a lot of time outdoors in the rain, they may range from timid to wild; try the experience a few times so they can get used to exploring the rainy world.

Rainy Day Spring Art Projects

Although there are a lot of projects that you can do indoors on a rainy day, these art projects for kids require some rainy to complete these crafts. These projects work best with a light rain; a downpour will wash the color out of the paper. Kids will need to bring these projects outside and leave them in the rain for a few minutes.

Rainy Day Sun Catcher
Run your hand over a coffee filter so to make it as flat as possible. Color the paper with washable marker. Bring the filter outside and set it on a deck or driveway. Once the paper is wet (which depends on how hard it is raining), bring the paper inside to dry. The water will encourage the ink to seep over the paper. When the paper is dry, tape these disks in a window that gets a lot of sun.

Tie Dye Wrapping Paper
You’ll need white paper towel and washable markers. Again color the paper (it isn’t necessary to cover the entire piece with marker) and set out in the rain for a couple of minutes. You can set the paper on trays (like a cookie sheet), but you want to use the back of the tray, particularly if it has sides, so you don’t trap a puddle of water. Hang or drape the paper so it dries. You can wrap small gifts in the paper, either taping
it closed or wrapping ribbon around it.

Painting with Watercolors
If you have a watercolor palette that has only hard bits of paint in the corners of each section, pop out the paint and break it into tiny pieces. Set the paper on the back of a tray or cookie sheet. Scatter the pieces over a sheet of watercolor paper in a random way or individually place the broken pieces of paint.

Bring outside and allow the rain to mix with the paint. This will take longer than the projects with the washable markers. When you bring the paper inside, you can either dab at the puddles of paint with a scrunched up piece of paper towel or you can sprinkle the paper with kosher salt – when the paint dries, you can brush off the salt leaving behind an interesting pattern.

Some kids fear getting wet (Do they have to change their clothes if they get damp? Will their mom become angry if there is mud on their shoes?). Some parents might view sending their kids out into the rain as a hassle. For these projects kids can run out and back in, with no need to change into boots and raincoat. Of course, while the kids are waiting for the paint and ink to do its thing, you can encourage the kids to run around in the rain, stomp in puddles, and look for earthworms on the surface soil. You could even join them.

Weather or Not to Send Kids Outside

Originally published 4/06/2011 at explorelongtheway.com

Many adults remember playing outdoors as kids no matter what the weather was; in fact, the way they tell it, their parents insisted on it. Drizzle or downpour, sun or snow, kids played outdoors. The ironic thing is that the topic of playing outside as kids comes up when people start commenting on how today’s kids stay indoors because their parents insist on it.

Now, theoretically, some of those outdoor-playing children of the past are the present-day parents with the deer-in-the-headlights look when they hear that their child will be walking through more than an inch of snow or going outside during a light rain.

So, what happened to the outdoor-playing children of the past to turn them into weather-wary parents of the present? In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv cites evidence to the benefits of being outdoors along with data supporting the increasing unlikelihood of finding children enjoying the outdoors. Yet, if children have a place to go outside – whether it is the schoolyard or the backyard – why do many adults use weather to stop them at the door? Current outdoor clothing seems more apt for the weather than what I wore thirty-plus years ago as a kid. Still, as a child, I was entrenched in a variety of weather-appropriate outerwear.

However, I have seen kids come to outdoor field trips without hats, gloves, and no more than a sweatshirt when there was two feet of snow on the ground. During rainy days at summer camp – a nature camp, mind you, numerous children wouldn’t arrive with a raincoat and they would insist that they didn’t even own such a garment.

I’m thinking that some kids don’t have things to wear outdoors so they don’t go outside and their parents don’t buy them outerwear because their kids don’t go outdoors. Will the child who runs from vehicle to building when it is raining ever become an adult who does more than move from one climate-controlled environment to the next? Will watching the nature channel on a rainy day replace laughing at bedraggled squirrels trying to twitch their tails dry and fluffy or pulling earthworms out of puddles and moving them to the drier soil beneath the shrubs. Can you love nature when you don’t even know it?