my dad used to say it was the reflection from the ocean. :)

Because God made it that way.

Very often the reason we don't know how to explain something to a child is that we don't know how to explain it to an adult. Can you explain to an adult why the sky is blue? Perhaps not. Therefore you would have trouble explaining it to a child. To my own children (though I can't recall them asking this question) I would have said "God made the sky a color that everybody likes a lot, so that we'll want to go to heaven someday."

I'd tell them honestly. I probably wouldn't say "Scattering of light particles in the atmosphere..." but I would attempt to explain it to the best of my knowledge so they could understand, and if I could not, I'd call it an excuse to visit the library and find a book on it appropriate for the child's age and understanding.

Its blue because its a little sad, it knows you didnt brush your teeth and when it rains its crying... :D evil but productive!

For the same reason the grass is green..and I'm tall and your short...and cats are cats and dogs are dogs..because its Gods big plan for everything to be distincly differant.

For the same reason the grass is green..and I'm tall and your short...and cats are cats and dogs are dogs..because its Gods big plan for everything to be distincly differant.

if I didn't know the answer we would look it up together.

"The sky is not actually blue. It only looks blue because 'blue' is the name we have given that color." That will stop them asking questions for an hour at least.

Wow. Anyone whose initial response to that kind of question involves "god" is 1. mentally lazy; 2. doing a significant disservice to their children's learning process. An aware, minimally educated adult should at least be cognizant that there is an easily accessible explanation from physics why the sky is blue (which involves both the nature of light-refracting particles as well as the modern human activities which have augmented this phenomenon-- look it up in a book). Much more importantly, parents need to be aware that their children are trying to figure out the world around them. This process is important not only because the crucial empirical data that they acquire at a young age stays with them and helps build the foundations of their basic perceptions as adults (and when competing against other, more informed kids in college), but also because it is paramountly useful to reinforce the paradigm that when they ask the right kinds of questions (eg, about universal things) they get sufficient, coherent answers that are respectful of the question. "god" as an answer to any worthwhile children's question is neither sufficient nor respectful of that child's intellect. These types of answers serve to breed ignorance in children as they grow older. If they are taught that "god" is a sufficient answer to any question that they don't understand, they will continue to accept the fact that they are missing both crucial pieces of information about the world and the ability to find, detect, and absorb new information. And by-the-way, if you're an adult and you find yourself leaning on "god" for answers to simple questions, maybe you should re-examine your own basic understanding of the world around you. The information is out there, and any responsible adult should have picked up much of it already.

Tell it the real answer. Stop fart-arsing around with god and all that other useless and irrelevant crap.

If they're old enough to ask, they're old enough to know why. Simply, the way it works is the shorter light waves (blue) get "stuck" up in the sky in gas molecules. Phrase it in terms appropriate to their age. "Sunlight is made up of lots of colors of light - that's why sunshine makes rainbows. When the sun shines through the sky, the blue light gets left behind to make the sky blue."

*ahem* The sun sends light that can be refelected in a varity of colors. Most colors are obsorbed by objects. Some colors are reflected, sent back, and those are what we see.