Children can experience orographic and rain shadow effects with an interactive obstacle course. Start by dividing your class into teams of equal numbers of students. For each team, you will need two big buckets and two or more smaller buckets. Fill one large bucket from each team with water and place it at the beginning of the obstacle course. Place the other large bucket at the end of the obstacle course and leave it empty. Set up a series of obstacles that the students must run, jump or climb over. Poke small holes in the bottom of the smaller buckets.
Give each team their smaller buckets with the holes in the bottom. The students must dip these buckets into the water-filled large buckets at the start of the course. These large buckets represent the ocean, and the smaller buckets represent the clouds. The students must carry their “clouds” over the obstacles -- the “mountains” -- and dump the remaining water in the other large bucket. The project is over once they empty the first bucket. As the students cross the mountains, the cloud water will leak or splash out of the container. There will be significantly less water in the collecting buckets.
Assign your students a geographic area to study, or let them choose one. Good choices include Washington State, Oregon, Virginia, North Carolina and eastern California. Provide your students with maps showing major cities, mountains, rivers and lakes of the areas. Then give them a list of the average yearly precipitation for the cities in the region they are studying. A good source for this information is provided in the Resources section.
Instruct the students to devise a means of color coding rainfall amounts in their geographic area. For example, areas that receive 0-10 inches of rain per year could be yellow, and areas that receive 10-20 inches of rain per year could be orange. Have them color their map to show the rainfall amounts. The resulting map visually demonstrates the orographic and rain shadow effects.