Rain

Look at pavements and roads when it has been raining, especially once it dark. Notice the wonderful glistening which occurs when the streetlights and car headlights shine down on the wet surface. When you are driving in the rain in the dark, show your child how the car’s headlights light up a very shiny road and highlight the spray from excess water on the road’s surface.

Ask your child to look out for reflections on wet surfaces. When walking along the pavement when it has been raining, look out for the multicolored effects you may be able to see in the gutter, caused by oil dispersing on water. Why might your child see these patterns at the side of road? Explain how some oil escapes from cars when they are parked at the roadside. Can he tell you what will happen when the sun comes out again?

Spiders’ webs

Look out for the webs made much more visible by dew. Rain drops sit on the web and highlight the beautiful and intricate shape of it. Note how strong the web must be so that it is not destroyed by the weight of the water. In the winter, you may be lucky enough to find the webs covered in frost, emphasizing their shape in the same way.
See if you child can see the spider in the web or indeed, any prey that is caught in it. Look carefully at the shapes involved. Can he draw a web with white chalk on black paper?

Seasonal colors in the garden

Notice how the colors get brighter and more profuse in summer. In winter, gardens are very bare, with no color on the tress. In spring, bright green leaves start to appear on the tress, together with flowering shrubs and flowers. In summer, leaves on the trees are fully opened in every shade of green and there is a mass of other color around. Autumn sees leaves beginning to turn red and brown before they fall off, leaving the trees bare again.

Can your child tell you which season it is from looking at the garden? Let him paint or make a collage of a garden in the four different seasons.

Sun’s rays shining down through the trees

Encourage your child to look at the lovely light effects observed in a wood when the sun is shining. What does he think causes these? Point out how the sun shines onto and through the leaves of the trees, thus producing dappled effects on the wood ‘floor’.

Can your child see this effect elsewhere? Look out for plants causing similar dappled effects in garden or park. At home, let him experiment by putting a colander between a light source and a piece of white paper on the floor. Notice the same effect. Again, the light is only coming through the holes in the colander, like the gaps in the trees.

Sunsets

Notice how the sky turns the most beautiful shades of red, yellow and purple as the sun sinks down behind the clouds. As your child looks at the sunset, point out how everything in front of the bright sun looks black. Objects become ‘silhouetted’ against the bright red, pink and orange.

Let your child create his own sunsets by painting water onto drawing paper until it is quite wet and then putting on blobs of bright red, orange and purple paint, allowing the colors to mix freely. Another way to create the same effect is to glue torn strips of tissue paper, in appropriate colors, over each other in a random pattern. When the ‘sunsets’ are dry, add some silhouetted objects to the pictures, using thick black felt-tip pen, or by sticking on black paper shapes.

Rainbows

Look at all the different colors in rainbow, can he see them all – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet? Why is he seeing rainbow now and not at other times? Explain how the effect is produced when there is rain and sunshine together.
Have fun painting a rainbow, or making one with small pieces of colored paper, when you get home.

Sun’s rays shinning through the clouds

Point out this very beautiful phenomenon when you cannot see the sun but its rays shine down through the clouds. Can your child tell you where the rays are coming from?
Again, encourage use of his imagination by asking him to make up a story of what could be behind the cloud causing such a strange effect in the sky.