What is rain?

It has been raining so much in Melbourne lately, so Alicia started to get quite concerned why we are not going to the park much and asking questions like "Why is it raining?". I recently saw this Watercycle activity on Pinterest and decided to make our own with Alicia, although more simple one without getting into "condensation","precipitation" kind of vocabulary. I remember learning abouth these processes at school when I was 10, and since my daughter is not even 3.5 yet I used simple explanations like:"Rain is water that falls from the clouds in the sky. Water is everywhere: in the rivers, oceans, lakes and puddles. When the sun shines, it turns water into tiny drops and they float up into the sky. There they cuddle together to make clouds. Then clouds get bigger and heavier and can't hold the water any more, so it falls back from the sky and makes rain.".

This is how our picture looked at the end:

This idea came to me when I saw weather cut out shapes on sale in our "Riot Art and Craft" store just for 99 c the whole pack (normally a few dollars).

We started with making a cloud: glueing cotton balls to the cloud cut-out shape:

Then Alicia painted sun shape in yellow and water cut-out in blue:

We left the shapes to dry and continued the next day when we put it all together. Alicia loves stickers so I decided to give her fish stickers to add to the water shapes to make it more interesting.

Then we added water drops going towards the sun stickers (they were part of fish sticker set) and also raindrops stickers - the only once I could find were coloured with dots, but that's ok.

Once we finished I threw in some pre-reading exercise (in Russian - I only use Russian when speaking to Alicia). I wrote the words like "sun", "sea", "drop", "cloud" on pieces of paper, read them out loud to her and got her to place them on the corresponding picture. Then we repeated this exercise a couple of times again in the following days.

The book we used to get explanation about the rain is the one below. I love how simple the explanations are.