Make A Homemade Tornado In A Bottle

This easy tornado in a bottle activity below is pretty exciting for young kids! Introduce simple concepts about the weather with hands-on learning about tornadoes that is safe! Bonus, rain cloud activity included too!

TORNADOS AND RAIN CLOUDS FOR WEATHER SCIENCE

weather science experiments indoors activity

WEATHER ACTIVITIES FOR PRESCHOOLERS

Why Science?

My son loves our science experiments. He is a high energy, sensory seeking little boy who enjoys highly stimulating activities. Science experiments provide just the right amount of everything for him to become fully engage and interactive with what we are doing together.

We have been enjoying two books lately. Otis and the Tornado by Loren Long and The Berenstain Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature by Stan & Jan Berenstain which were both birthday presents. Both books talk about tornados and I thought it would be neat to show Liam how a tornado is formed and what happens when there is a tornado.

The Berenstain Bears keep it simple by calling it a big wind that lifts objects off the ground as opposed to lesser strength winds like breezes. I am pretty sure talking about a vortex is out of the question. Also since we were talking about things that happen during a storm, I thought about showing Liam how it rains from clouds.

HOMEMADE TORNADO IN A BOTTLE

Materials:

2 x 1 liter bottles (we drank a lot of seltzer today)
metal washer that fits closely to the top of the bottle
duct tape (we used flex fix tape)
glitter (cause it’s cool and we called it debris)
some of our bats from a package of table scatter (optional)

Set Up:

STEP 1: Fill one bottle almost to the top and add the glitter and bats.

STEP 2: Place washer on top and then put the second bottle’s opening on top of the washer. Seal tightly with the tape (several layers) so it doesn’t bend.

STEP 3: Turn the bottle over so the water is on the top and get a good swirling motion going to create the vortex.

A vortex is created when the rotating liquids form a spiral around a center line and the liquid falls through thanks to gravity forming a continuous vortex. Maybe you don’t need to go into many details or maybe you do!

However, you should see the tornado start to form and the hole in the middle! Pretty cool. You can do it over and over again and point out little facts each time. This will get repeated many times!

RAIN CLOUD EXPERIMENT

How does it rain? Basically the clouds get heavy with big droplets of water and then they fall to Earth and it is called rain. Preschool version with a child to excited to see shaving cream.

MATERIALS:

Large jar or container
Shaving cream
food coloring

SET UP:

We used a large vase with a good sized opening. I thought it would be fun to drop pumpkins in so that it looked like it was raining on a pumpkin patch.

Then we squirted a big, puffy blob of shaving cream on top to represent a full cloud.

Next he squirted the food coloring on top and we watched it eventually fall through our shaving cream cloud to make rain. The more he added the quicker it fell. Good for showing the difference between a drizzle and a down pour.

We used our whole bottle of blue food coloring until we had a real storm brewing over our pumpkins. The we watched and examined the vase!

Extend The Fun

We made shaving cream clouds. I set out some blue construction paper and let him make plops and glops on the paper and swirl it all around.

This gave us an opportunity to talk about what we had just done. He also did a bit of drawing with his finger in the clouds and even wrote his name.

MORE EASY EXPERIMENTS FOR PRESCHOOLERS