Skip to main content

Evaporation in Less Than a DAY!

So this week, my youngest daughter has learned about the water cycle. We have used In The Hands of a Child's Water Cycle Unit.

In the unit, we have to do an evaporation experiment. We have actually done one of these before years ago when learning about clouds. You can see my post here when we did it in 2012. This time there was a BIG difference! I'm about to tell you why. It was more than just a learning experiment of evaporation, it actually ended up being a learning experiment about WHERE water is evaporating from for my youngest and oldest daughter, too.

In 2012, we lived in Tennessee. When we did our water evaporation experiment in Tennessee, it took days or maybe even weeks for all the water to disappear. It definitely took a couple of days or a few for the water to even move down the cup. Now in 2017, we live in Arizona...that's right - the DESERT! Anyone see where I am going with this? With this experiment, we filled the water to the line we marked on the cup and put it out this morning and before the sun had even set, the water was gone! My youngest daughter was amazed because she slightly remembers the last time we did this. Her hypothesis was at least a few days (because we put a smaller amount in the cup than last time).


This became a lesson on the humidity in Tennessee versus the dry desert in Arizona causing the time of the evaporation process to be different. Because of the humidity, the evaporation project took longer and because of the desert and it being so dry here, it evaporated so fast.

Yay! Don't ya love it when an experiment turns into more than you thought it would?




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How We Do Current Events as an Elective and Why I Think it is Important

When I sat down with my high schooler with a list of electives she could choose from to do this year, she chose current events as one of those. I thought I'd write a post on what we do for our current event subject. Each morning we start off with Channel One News . I was so glad when I came upon this website because I remember being in school and Channel One News came on every morning and we had to watch it in class. I'm not trying to make our homeschool like "public school", but my oldest and I grab a cup of coffee and just cozy up to watch the news like many Americans do in the morning. So I was thrilled to find it. It is definitely a news source that relates to middle school and high school students, even teaching them a "n ews related  word of the day" that they may hear in stories in the video. Sometimes there are even polls that you can vote on after the video and they could be featured in the next day video. We participated in one of the polls on ou...

Solar System Bracelets

Well, it was that time again - to learn about the solar system, galaxies, how we get our seasons, the moon phases, etc. You can check out our Space Unit that we completed a couple years ago, when we covered space. Meant To Teach: What's out there in space??? Also, here is the solar system we completed a couple of years ago. Meant To Teach: Solar System Complete This time I decided to do something different with the girls. I might add, it was also much easier than our solar system above. I decided to do solar bracelets this time!

Reflections of our first year schooling at home

Here's my top ten list of things I've learned this year: 10. Yes, its okay to stay in pajamas while we learn. I started off the school year saying we would get dressed. But this being our first year of homeschooling...I think its one of the things my daughters love best. Who cares right? After we learn, we get dressed and get out the door to wherever we gotta go! Not every one of my homeschool friends do this and that's okay, too. Its the beauty of homeschooling...we're flexible! 9. We stay up a little later than we probably should. My daughters are all the time saying, "Regular school kids are probably in bed." Sometimes we just like to spend more family time together and with my husband sometimes working late - we stay up late. We don't do it all the time...they do have a bed time of 10:00 on school nights. They are happy with that time, because its 2 hours later than when they were in public school. However, there are sometimes that we do have to ma...