Earth and Sky - Water, Water, Everywhere

Focus: Earth's water is a finite resource, never increasing or decreasing, yet continually changing form as it circulates from the land or oceans to the air and back again in a never-ending cycle.

Puppets (Wally Water Drop, Winnie Water Drop, Marsha Mouse, Willie Worm, Sammy Salmon, Tree)

Materials Checklist
Puppet Show (puppets, script, sheet metal (for thunder sounds), water mister)
Water, Water, Everywhere Mural (large landscape outline, pictures of pond, stream, glacier, soil, clouds, water well, animals, trees and other plants, rain, snow, ocean, tape)
Moving Waters (dishpan, food coloring, water, cups, materials: construction paper, newspaper, paper towels, fabric, scissors)
Evapo-race (plates, smooth stones, spray bottle, water, heat lamp, folded paper fans)
Water in the Air? (quart-size glass canning jars, thermos of very hot water, small metal cans, ice cubes)
Where's the Water Scavenger Hunt (Water Scavenger Hunt cards, clipboards, pencils)
Going in Cycles (signs for station markers, bags, labeled game chips, optional travel logs and pencils)
But Ne'er a Drop to Drink (gallon jug of water, measuring cup, tablespoon, teaspoon)
Toothpick Race (water, waxed paper, toothpicks)
Penny Piggyback (water, pennies, hand lenses)
Sink That Ice (dishpan, water, ice cubes)
Color Changers (celery stalks or white carnations, colored water, dishpan)
Hot & Cold Demonstration (quart jar, small jar, hot water, cold water, food coloring)
Around the Water Cycle (K-2 ELF) (handouts with pictures, scissors, crayons)

Supplemental Reference Materials (Where's the Water? hunt cards, Going in Circles game, Mural pieces, Mural diagram, Water Cycle diagram, K-2 Around the Water Cycle, Water's Believe It or Not, Cold and Hot Water Demonstration)

Additional Reading/Resources
The Magic School Bus Wet All Over: A Book About the Water Cycle, by Patricia Relf, Scholastic Press, 1996.
Water, Water Everywhere: A Book About the Water Cycle, by Melvin and Gilda Berger, Ideals Childrens Books, 2001.
Water Dance, by Thomas Locker, Harcourt Press, 1997.
Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water, by Philip Ball, University of California Press, 2001.

ELF Notes - Template for newsletter on Water, Water, Everywhere
* Word document * pdf file

For Younger Children
Many of the activities in VINS's new Small Wonders book can be used in ELF, too. To find appropriate activities for children aged 3-6, click here.

Teaching Suggestions

Get the kids thinking about where rainwater goes in the city and what potential problems are created when much of the ground surface is paved and used for buildings, sidewalks, and parking lots making the ground impenetrable to water.

What happens to rainwater in the city that's different than in the country? Water that sweeps off paved surfaces is called “run-off”. Some cities have sewer systems to collect the water. Eventually run-off is channeled into rivers and streams, sometimes treated to remove harmful chemicals, sometimes not. What re-enters the water cycle is not as clean as what fell as rain.

What pollutants might rainwater pick up rushing down city streets? Likely gas and oil derivatives, chemical spills. Chemical pollution occurs in rural areas too, often from farms. But in heavily paved urban areas, harmful substances become concentrated in the run-off. In rural areas, the ground itself acts as a filter to contain harmful substances until they can break down. The soil slows the migration of pollution into natural waterways, at least allowing contaminants to seep instead of sweep all at once into groundwater systems.

How might these contaminants affect the river/ stream inhabitants?

Moving water
Tape the samples to be tested on a paint stick and lower them into a tub of water simultaneously. It is fun to make this into a race or contest to add some excitement. You might have children examine samples with hand lenses and then make their best guess as to which will move water more quickly. You might try testing different brands of paper towels.

Several groups set up long term experiments with a carnation (or celery stalk) and colored water, splitting the carnation and placing each side in a different color. The paste form of food coloring works much better than liquid food coloring.

Coffee filters work well to demonstrate capillary action. You can add food coloring in a line and watch it spread.

Mural
You can simply have children place the pictures on a blank board rather than using a mural. Then, challenge them to keep going one after the other to place their picture. Include several rays of sunshine for evaporation and extra clouds and various forms of precipitation. Or, this mural can be created as a felt board.

Use the mural simply to show where in the world water is stored. This makes a good visual that helps with the water cycle game when the kids go to those 6 stations.

For those in city schools, you might want to add buildings, roads and parking lots, a reservoir instead of a pond, sewer system instead of streams leading into the river, etc to your mural.

Where's The Water Scavenger Hunt
Let the students answer the questions imaginatively, if they can't see it where they are. For example, for water you can hear, kids might answer a waterfall or a faucet dripping or a coffee pot perking or waves crashing or…

Going in Cycles
Have kids evenly divided among stations for the 1st game. Start the 2nd game with no students at the ocean station.

If you live in a city, be sure to discuss other places water may be in the cycle such as the roof of your school, a local stream, a reservoir, as well as faraway rivers, oceans, etc. Also, emphasize the important role of city trees in the water cycle. Ninety percent of the water is released along with oxygen back into the air through the leaves.

Additional activities
You might want to frame this lesson around the different properties of water:
States of matter – what state is water in at room temperature? At 32 degrees F? What shape is water as a liquid, solid, gas? Pour some water in a shallow pan, in a tall bottle;
Capillary action – in the water mural we see water moving downstream pulled by gravity, but it can also move UP, as it does through trees or as we see in Moving Waters;
Polarity – because each water molecule has a positive and a negative end, water is attracted to (and bonds with) water. Place a drop of water on waxed paper and use a tooth pick to pull it along.
This attraction can be demonstrated by seeing how many drops of water can fit on a penny when dropped with an eyedropper? To a certain point, the molecular attraction is even stronger than the force of gravity! Amazing just how many drops can fit on (depending on size of drop, placement of drop and some say heads or tails). Be sure to have children look at their resulting water drop on penny with a hand lens;
Surface tension – challenge students to float a paper clip! (hint: use a fork to place the clip on the surface of the water.) Add a drop of detergent to break surface tension and watch the paper clip fall.
Evaporation – as in Evapo-Race;
Condensation – as in Water in the Air?

Extension
As a longer term project, you could set up an evaporation water cleaner in the classroom. Put dirty water in dishpan, empty mason jar set in dishpan. Cover with plastic wrap, add stone on top of plastic wrap so it is over mason jar. Water evaporates, condenses on plastic wrap and drips off plastic into jar, perfectly clean…to show evaporation is important cleansing part of the water cycle.

A few facts: the average total home water use for each person in the US is about 50 gallons per day. Water expands by 9% when it freezes; ice is lighter than water, which is why ice floats in water.

Percolation Race: Add an additional container with the soil covered by a plastic jar cap to simulate nonporous asphalt to see what happens. Color Changers: Have the kids predict what the consequences might be if a plant's available water is polluted. Try using salt water in one container to see what happens to the celery.

For a helpful graphic abpout the distribution of water on Earth, see http://earth.rice.edu/mtpe/hydro/hydrosphere/hot/freshwater/0water_chart.html.

Learning Goals

Concepts/Ideas

• The earth's water moves from the earth to the atmosphere and back again in a process known as the water cycle.
• Water from the atmosphere reaches the earth by precipitation or by condensation. Water from the earth reaches the atmosphere through the processes of evaporation, transpiration and respiration.
• Water molecules are attracted to other materials and to each other and have a tendency to move into tiny spaces, a process called capillary action.
• Animals and plants depend on water for survival, ingesting it in the liquids they drink or absorb.
• Although water covers three-quarters of the earth's surface, only a small percentage of the supply is fresh water.

Vocabulary: water cycle, precipitation, condensation, water vapor, evaporation, respiration, capillary action, transpiration, ground water, glaciers (definitions)

Skills

• Active listening and role-playing to visualize a water drop's journey through the water cycle.
• Identifying by modeling and role-playing, some of the places water is found and some of the many pathways within the water cycle.
• Investigating how water travels through some substances by capillary action.
• Using tools to investigate how wind and warmth cause water to evaporate.
• Observing the condensation of water vapor into water droplets and discussing the process.
• Finding and recording evidence of water and the water cycle outdoors.

Grade Expectations
Grades PK-K (S30) Living animals and plants need water to survive

Grades 1-2 (S12, S14) Water can be a liquid or a solid through processes of melting and freezing. Heating and cooling can change states of matter.

Grades 3-4 (S12, S14, S48) Adding heat can change water from a solid, to a liquid, to a gas. Water in any of its forms can be observed, described and measured. Water is changed by heat from the sun to gas (vapor) and returns to liquid when cooled or solid state when cooled to the freezing point.

Grades 5-6 (S14, S48)Energy is required to transform the physical state of water from solid, to liquid, to gas while conserving mass. Physical changes are reversible. Water is cycled; it evaporates from the surface of the earth, rises, and cools and falls again. (Water cycle)

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