Rain, raining. Rain, raining. Rain, raining.

We decided to embrace the rain today.

Since we saw Michael Rosen at Hay, Ferdy's been looking up a lot of his poems and one of his favourites, which we found this week, is The Rains. Ferdy loves his voice where he says about the rain stopping, 'there were birds! It was light, warm in the sleeping bag, cold on our faces'. And whenever I've heard the rain this weekend (which has been often), I drum 'Rain, raining. Rain raining' in my head.

We'd been to Ferdy's Fathers' Day service at school this Friday and Ferdy is always a little edgy (and grumpy) after an hour of sitting down, so, armed with raincoats, wellies and lunch, we went straight out to search for rain (our obvious theme for the day), muddy puddles, things that like rain (ducks, geese, slugs) at the Wolseley Wildlife Centre.

tl-bl clockwise: the biggest muddy puddle; looking at bank voles; building a den;
in the meadow; in the tunnels; drawing the weather (sun, rain and rainbow)

Finding rain wasn't hard, and, thanks to one of the regular birdwatchers at the centre, we found a few extra things like baby bank voles (look closely in above top middle pictures), some muddy tunnels, a large den, a robin and a flash of kingfisher. Ferdy was most excited about the bank voles to whom he fed some of his duck food.

Back at home we measured how much rain we'd caught in cups placed outside. Annoyingly the rain stopped in the afternoon so we only got about 25ml.

We read some fact books about the water cycle (unpopular because they weren't stories) and then some other books with stories about rain in them (popular because they were stories). Favourites were The Rhythm of the Rain, a beautiful retelling of the water cycle, and Sam Usher's Rain.

It wasn't easy to get Ferdy to do any writing today, he seems to have decided that he can't write again (writing currently is a very loud affair with lots of ohohohohohs and OOOOOPSes whenever he forgets to space his words, writes a letter the wrong way around or forgets a capital), so instead of a poem (which we'd agreed on the day before), we compromised on him writing 10 words describing rain and the sound of rain. My favourite is pffffffff. Michael Rosen didn't start writing poems 'til he was 11 anyway, so there's loads of time...