Clouds and Teachers
Experiment | Meet the Class | Listen in RealAudio
Email your weather question

Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the weather Notebook.

Last month, we enlisted a brave teacher to join in our new segment called "Teacher Feature." Sue Ann Martin, a fifth grade instructor at Broken Ground School in Concord, New Hampshire, got instructions from me by phone on how to make a cloud with her students. Yesterday on the Weather Notebook. we heard from some of them. Today, we learn more from Sue Ann.

SAM: The experiment went really well. We started out by having a discussion about what would be a good recipe for a cloud and the fifth graders did some reading and worked in teams to try to come up with how a cloud is made. And then we had our experiment and then talked about how what we did in the experiment related to the information that they had discussed.

BY: Were the kids surprised that the experiment actually worked?

SAM: They were and we did it several times because there are twenty-four students and they all wanted a chance to get a really good view and to feel what was coming out. They were surprised.

Sue Ann told us that the kids asked the most questions about condensation.

SAM: Most of our questions came up when we were bending the bottle. The students were curious about why that was happening because we don't see the atmosphere bending.

BY: So, did they understand that, in the bottle, they needed to heat the atmosphere so that it would cool down and it's actually the cooling that causes the condensation.

SAM: Right, they understood that part and then when we looked over our reading material we could see that the warm air expands and spreads out and that's what was happening in the bottle too.

BY: Sue Ann Martin from Broken Ground School, thank you very much.

SAM: Thank you. Good to talk to you.

BY: You too.

Miss anything? Go to our website for the skinny on this classroom experiment. That's weathernotebook.org. We're a production of the Mount Washington Observatory supported by Subaru.