Watch the entire weather system happen inside a cup of water — clouds, rain, evaporation, and condensation. Better than the Weather Channel!
What You’ll Need
🥃 Clear glass or jar
🍦 Shaving cream
💧 Water
🎨 Blue or other food coloring
🥄 Spoon or dropper
How to Do It
1. Fill the glass about 3/4 with water.
2. Spray shaving cream on top to form a fluffy ‘cloud.’ (Make it tall enough to fill the top 1/3 of the glass!)
3. Use the dropper to put 3–4 drops of food coloring on TOP of the cloud.
4. Watch! As the food coloring weighs the cloud down, blue ‘rain’ starts dripping down through the cloud into the water below! 🌧️
What You Just Saw
This is a model of how real clouds work — but in a few minutes instead of days!
🌫️ The shaving cream represents a real CLOUD (just like fluffy white clouds in the sky)
💧 The food coloring represents WATER VAPOR rising up from the ground
🌧️ When the cloud becomes too ‘heavy’ with water, it starts dropping rain
How Real Clouds Make Rain
🌞 The sun heats the ground and water on Earth
🌫️ Water turns into invisible water vapor and rises up
☁️ Up high, the vapor cools and condenses into tiny water droplets — forming clouds
💧 The droplets keep colliding and merging into bigger droplets
🌧️ When droplets get heavy enough, gravity pulls them down — that’s rain!
The Water Cycle
The whole cycle has 4 main steps:
1️⃣ Evaporation — Water turns to vapor
2️⃣ Condensation — Vapor forms clouds
3️⃣ Precipitation — Rain, snow, or hail falls
4️⃣ Collection — Water flows back to oceans, lakes, rivers — and the cycle starts again!
The same water you drink today might have been:
🦖 Once a tear from a dinosaur
👑 Once an ice cube in Cleopatra’s drink
🌊 Crossed every ocean
Water never disappears — it just goes round and round forever!
Rain Facts
🌧️ A typical rain droplet is about 1 mm wide
💨 They fall at 30 km/h (a slow car!)
🌍 The wettest place on Earth: Mawsynram, India — gets 11,000+ mm of rain per year
🌪️ The driest place on Earth: Atacama Desert, Chile — some spots haven’t seen rain in 100 years!
Watch the weather happen in your kitchen — and never look at rain the same way again! 🌧️
