The Fairy-Land of Science · Lecture I, part 2 · Part 1: Lecture I: The fairy-land of science
2. The fairies in a rain shower
Goal: Your child can name three of Buckley's invisible "fairies" at work in a rain shower (heat, cohesion and gravitation) and show that water pulls itself into round drops.
You'll need
- A piece of wax paper, a plastic lid or a waxy leaf
- A cup of water and a straw or spoon (or an eyedropper)
- A toothpick
- Science notebook and pencils
What's in the book
Pages 7 to 13. Buckley asks children to go outside and watch nature, and to use their imagination to picture what they cannot see. She shows the fairies at work in a rain shower, a snowflake, a snowdrop growing, and a coal fire that gives back the sunbeams of long ago.
The lesson, step by step
Hook question
SayWhen it rains, where do the drops come from? And why do they come down as drops, not as a long string of water?
Let your child guess. Buckley asks just the same thing.
Read together
Read pages 7 and 8, then the rain shower on pages 8 and 9.
Just go out into the country, and sit down quietly and watch nature at work.
Watch a shower of rain. Where do the drops come from? and why are they round, or rather slightly oval?
Buckley says the one gift we need is imagination:
the power of making pictures or images in our mind, of that which is, though it is invisible to us.
The idea in plain words
Buckley's three rain fairies:
Heat holds tiny bits of water apart, floating unseen in the air.
Cohesion ("sticking together") grabs the bits when the air cools and pulls them into a drop.
Gravitation (gravity) pulls the drop down to the ground.
SayThe same gravity that keeps the Earth going round the Sun pulls every raindrop down.
Try it: watch water hold itself together
Put a few drops of water on the wax paper. Look from the side: they bunch up into little round domes. Push two drops close with the toothpick and watch them jump together into one bigger drop. That is cohesion at work.
Tilt the paper: gravity makes the drops roll downhill.
More fairies
Read or tell the rest of the passage: the snowflake, a six-pointed crystal star; the snowdrop bulb using sunbeams stored last year; and the coal fire.
and little thought that you were warming yourself with the sunbeams of ages and ages ago.
SayWe'll find out how coal holds old sunbeams in Lecture VIII.
Tell it back and check
Your child explains a rain shower using the three fairies. Then ask:
1. Which fairy holds water up in the air, unseen?
2. Which fairy makes the drops round?
3. Which fairy pulls them down?
Draw it
Draw a cloud with raindrops falling. Label: Heat, Cohesion, Gravitation, with an arrow for each one's job.
Afterwards
Notice it this week: drops on a window, on a leaf, on a spider's web. Are they round? Watch two drops run together on a window pane.
Tip
Buckley says it is better to hunt down an answer than to be told it: "a difficulty really hunted down is a triumph for ever." When your child asks a question this week, try finding the answer together by looking or testing.
Answers to the book's problems
1. Heat. 2. Cohesion. 3. Gravitation (gravity).
Worked out for this site from the scan. If a number in your copy differs, trust the book.