Try This at Home

MEASURING RAINDROPS

Don’t let summer afternoon showers rain on your parade! Turn a rainy day into an enriching experiment by using a few household items to investigate and measure the size of raindrops.

MATERIALS:

BAKING TRAY OR DISH RULER

FINE-MESH STRAINER

FLOUR LARGE BOWL

To get started, pour a 1-inch thick layer of flour onto the baking tray. Smooth out the flour with the ruler until it is even and flat. Next, take the tray outside and let about 10 to 20 raindrops fall into the flour. Depending on how hard it is raining, this might be very quick!

Very carefully and slowly, pour the flour through the fine-mesh strainer. There should be small clumps of flour left in the strainer when you are done – those are your raindrops!

To measure them, gently pour the raindrops onto a flat surface and use your ruler to see how wide they are. Are they bigger or smaller than you expected? What unit of measurement is better for measuring raindrops – inches or centimeters?