Once there was a raindrop!

After a couple of false alarms, the southwest monsoon has finally hit  some parts of India, including Bangalore! Despite being a watered down version of last year's monsoon, wet and rainy evenings  unmistakably mark the beginning of the rainy season, as opposed to some magazines, including a few children's publications would have you believe that we are heading into summer......simply because the West is at the peak of its summer!!  Seriously....aren't we Americanized enough already....must out seasons follow suit too?? Sure.....the international schools in India follow the American Baccalaureate system with their summer holidays coinciding with the summer break in the American schools......but they are still located in India.....right?? It is true that some parts of India are yet to experience  monsoon, but that doesn't mean  the whole nation has moved into a temperate zone and the cover feature  in a June-July supplement of a popular women's magazine should be "Hot new ideas for summer" !  As much as the  editors of the said magazine may want to belong to a different weather zone.....they better be "umbrella ready" when they visit Namma Bengaluru!!!  :-)

 

 

 

I almost did not have any book ready for our monsoon read.....and so chose to reserve this book at the British Library over three weeks ago. But by the time the book arrived.... not only did the monsoon intensify...but also I had a couple more books to read during this year's rainy season! To start with, we read "Once there was a raindrop" by Judith Anderson and Mike Gordon, a part of the Nature's Miracles series. The timing couldn't have been more perfect as Abhay had read "Forms of Water" at school as a part of his EVS (Environmental Science) This is a nice little book simplifying the concept of the water cycle to kids and throwing light on  what happens to a raindrop once its falls on the ground.   Though a work of non-fiction, the author beautifully explains the concept with the aid of cheerful illustrations of children shown jumping into puddles, getting soaked in rain or going up a ropeway mirroring the water vapour rising high into the sky! So the raindrop that falls on your little one has a long way to go.....into the underground drain, then into stream and finally flows into the sea. That's not all, as the sun warms the surface of the sea, the warmer water turns into water vapour, which rises into the air and as it travels higher and higher, water vapour cools down to turn into tiny droplets of water accumulated in a cloud only to fall back on earth as raindrops again! So as you read on.....you realize that every drop of water is recycled, over and over again by Mother Nature. It's time we do too...isn't it?? A nice little book that has rain on every page...just ls we hope to have rain ...every day!!!