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Have you run out of ideas for keeping your child engaged on a rainy day? Explore UP to find a range of simple everyday experiences that will support your child's learning and development. Below you will find an experience to support a Preschool aged child.

Collecting rainfall

Support your child's mathematical development as they have a go at measuring rainfall.

Safety First

No additional considerations.

What to do

During a rainy day, find a plastic container such as an empty bottle or tub which can be used to collect rain water in. Use a marker pen to mark lines going up on the side of the container equal distance apart. Write the numbers 1-10 next to the lines, 1 being at the bottom and 10 being at the top. Your child could help you to make this.

Look at the numbers on the container and see if your child can recognise any of them. Encourage your child to make a prediction as to how much rainfall they think they may get. Make a prediction yourself and write both your predictions down. Following this, place the container outside to catch the rain.

During the experiment promote new words and open ended questions for your child to critically think for example "What will happen if the bottle becomes full?" After a while, have a look at the container and see how much rainfall you had. Compare this to your predictions, seeing if any of you were close to this.

Too easy?

Start a rainfall diary by encouraging your child to record down how much rain is in the container each day. Over a week, you could look at less and more to see which day you had the most rain and which day you had the least rain.

Too hard?

Introduce measuring into daily experiences or routines with your child, such as encouraging them to help you cook or seeing if they can measure items around the house, supporting their awareness of numbers and measurements.

More Information

For your child to be able to ask how, when and why questions they must first understand more abstract concepts such as cause-and-effect and time. When asking your child a how, when or why question, provide them with time to process their answer as this will require more than a single word.