Make a rainy day rain stick!

Take a used wrapping paper roll or even a toilet paper roll. If you have a shipping tube, that's even better. The firmer the cardboard, the better. The longer the tube, the better. A short tube makes more of a shaker than a continuous rain sound.
1. Fill the tube with rice, beans, sand, or beads. Allow the child to use a funnel or spoon the material into the tube. This is also good for their hand eye coordination. From personal experience, I have noticed that it works better if you use all of the same type of material for the "rain." For example, use all rice or all beads and don't mix them. Different materials make different sounds. If you want, you can make different rain sticks with different materials and notice the difference in sound.
2. Seal the end with cloth or something that won't tear. The last thing you want is sand or beans all over your floor. I use a strong glue to attach the fabric and seal it all around the ends of the tube. A rubber band will pull off and make a mess. I like the shipping tubes because they come with the hard plastic caps. I then glue the plastic caps in place.
3. Ok, so most of us have made this before so here is a more advance twist to it. To make your rain stick sound more like the actual percussion instrument, the "rain" needs something to "bump" into on the way down the tube. This addition works best with the hard cardboard tubes. Draw a line that swirls around the circumference of the tube from the top of the tube to the bottom. Take a hand full of nails and either push the nails through or hammer the nails about one inch apart along the swirled line that you drew (be sure to do this part for your child.) Then, take some masking tape, duct tape or packing tape and tape the nails in place along the line that you drew. You don't want the nails to come out.
4. Then you want to take some strong glue and glue paper around the entire tube. Let your kids decorate it with stickers, colors, or stamps. For a more permenant instrument, I glue fabric around the tube.