When it rains, several questions start tossing inside our mind!
When it rains, does it mean someone turned on a big water hose in the sky? Does rain happen when clouds get sad and start to cry? Or maybe rain happens when the sun and moon and stars try to take a bath…?
Rain comes from clouds, which are themselves made up of lots and lots of tiny droplets of water that are holding on to each other. Rain forms because the tiny droplets of water that make up a cloud sometimes get heavy, especially if the tiny droplets have bumped into each other and become bigger droplets. (It can take the joining of millions of these tiny droplets to form just one raindrop!) When the cloud’s droplets get heavy enough, gravity pulls them downward and they fall to the ground as rain!
After the rain water from the clouds falls to the ground and the sun comes back out, the fallen water evaporates again back into the air, so that we can have more clouds and (eventually) more rain! – It’s all part of the great Water Cycle!!
A final very important reason why we have rain is because it’s beneficial to lots of different things on Earth, like animals (who drink the water), plants (who soak up the water and use it to grow and make food), and you (who uses the water to swim, drink, bathe, and more!).
Wanna try a cool Rain Drop Experiment???
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Cool Rain Drop Experiment!
Ever wonder how big a raindrop really is? Try this experiment on a rainy day to see for yourself!
Pour some flour into a small, shallow pan and then use a straight-edge to make the flour smooth and level on top. Hold the pan out of the window for a brief moment and allow it to be hit by a few raindrops. Make sure you are careful to only do this when there is no thunder and lightning.
Once you have collected your raindrops, gently pour the flour from the pan into a bowl covered by a mesh sieve top. Tap the bowl or sieve until all the excess flour falls away and drops into the bowl.
The little masses of flour now left behind on top of the mesh sieve are raindrops you have captured! You can carefully pour them out to take a closer look and measure them if you'd like. Maybe you can even give names to some of them!
