Winnowing

Okay, so imagine you have a big bowl of cereal with a bunch of different things in it like flakes, nuts, and raisins. But you don't want to eat everything, you only want to eat the flakes because they are your favorite. So what can you do?

Well, you could start picking out the flakes by hand, but that would take a long time and would be really hard. Luckily, there's a way to make it easier! It's called winnowing.

To winnow, you take the bowl of cereal and pour it into another bowl, but this bowl has holes in the bottom. Then you take the bowl outside and you throw the cereal up in the air. What happens is that the air blows away all the other things in the cereal, like the nuts and raisins, but the flakes are heavier and they fall back down into the bowl through the holes.

So now you have a bowl of just the flakes, and you didn't have to pick them out by hand. That's winnowing! It's a way to separate the things you want from the things you don't want by using air. Farmers also use winnowing to separate grains from chaff, which is like the outer shell of the grain.