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!).