Water Spurts

I got the idea for this activity from "Science Play!" by Jill Frankel Hauser, though I have also seen it in other science for kids type books. The book has you using a large plastic bottle (like a 2 liter soda bottle), but I only had some plastic cups on hand. The idea is to put three vertical holes in the bottle, fill it with water, and watch as the jets of water spurt out to different distances. The cup of water didn't work as well in terms of different distances, but my son poured water in and watch it spurt out over and over for about 30 minutes.



I used a plastic cup, awl, and a baking pan to contain the water spurts.

  

The book says to heat a nail over a candle (while safely holding it with a pair of pliers), and use the warm nail to punch the holes. I used an awl instead.





Watching the water spurts.



Apparently with a bottle and holes spaced further apart, the highest spurt should arc less. But for us it went further out. We'll have to try a bottle sometime to see how the arcs compare.

 

We did try spacing some holes further apart on the other side of the cup. But Joey didn't really care too much about how much each spurt arced, he just wanted to see how fast the water would spurt out.