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Water Cycle Lesson
Water Cycle Lesson
In this introductory 5E learning cycle, students will explore what occurs in the water cycle through a
simulation in which they role-play a drop of water.
Teacher Background:
Water covers 71 percent of the Earth, and can exist in liquid, vapor, or solid forms. Water is constantly
moving; for example, it evaporates from oceans into the atmosphere, condenses to form clouds, falls as
rain or snow, and eventually returns to the oceans through a system of streams and rivers. Scientists
describe this movement of water in a model called the water cycle. Energy from the sun, which allows
evaporation, is the driving force that powers the water cycle.
Rationale:
Elementary student understanding of the cycling of water in and out of the atmosphere serves as a
prerequisite to learning about climatic patterns during middle school years. Therefore, it is important that
students have a firm grasp of these concepts and clarify common misconceptions. The national standards
documents provide insight into understanding what elementary students may think about the water cycle
prior to instruction:
Students are familiar with the change of state between water and ice, but the idea of liquids having a
set of properties is more nebulous and requires more instructional effort than working with solids. Most
students will have difficulty with the generalization that many substances can exist as either a liquid or
a solid. K-4 students do not understand that water exists as a gas when it boils or evaporates; they are
more likely to think that water disappears or goes into the sky. Despite that limitation, students can
conduct simple investigations with heating and evaporation that develop inquiry skills and familiarize
them with the phenomena. (National Science Education Standards)
Students' ideas about conservation of matter, phase changes, clouds, and rain are interrelated and
contribute to understanding the water cycle. Students seem to transit a series of stages to understand
evaporation. Before they understand that water is converted to an invisible form, they may initially
believe that when water evaporates it ceases to exist, or that it changes location but remains a liquid,
or that it is transformed into some other perceptible form (fog, steam, droplets, etc.) (Bar, 1989;
Russell, Harlen, & Watt, 1989; Russell & Watt, 1990). With special instruction, some students in 5th
grade can identify the air as the final location of evaporating water (Russel & Watt, 1990), but they must
first accept air as a permanent substance (Bar, 1989). This appears to be a challenging concept for
upper elementary students (Sere, 1985). Students can understand rainfall in terms of gravity in middle
school but not the mechanism of condensation, which is not understood until early high school (Bar,
1989).
Link to Standards:
The activities in this learning cycle will support understanding of the larger learning goal for a K-4 unit
focused on the water cycle. According to the National Science Education Standards (1996), Materials can
exist in different states--solid, liquid, and gas. Some common materials, such as water, can be changed
from one state to another by heating or cooling. According to the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993),
elementary students should develop understandings about the physical setting (in this case, the Earth):
The Physical Setting: Section B. The Earth
(K-2) Water can be a liquid or a solid and can go back and forth from one form to the other.
(3-5) When liquid water disappears, it turns into a gas (vapor) in the air and can reappear as a
liquid when cooled, or as a solid if cooled below the freezing point of water.
Physical, conceptual and mathematical models are commonly used by scientists to resemble what occurs
in the natural world. Elementary students can begin to consider the usefulness of a model as well as its
limitations. According to the Benchmarks for Science Literacy, K-2 students should know that:
A model of something is different from the real thing but can be used to learn something about the
real thing.
By the end of the 5th grade, students should know that:
Geometric figures, number sequences, graphs, diagrams, sketches, number lines, maps, and
stories can be used to represent objects, events, and processes in the real world, although such
representations can never be exact in every detail.
Materials List
The Waters Journey a childrens book by Eleonore Schmid
Water Wonders stations and chance cards (Actitivty #44 in Project Learning Tree Curriculum Guide)
For each student:
Paper (to draw the water cycle)
Paper (to write about the water cycle)
5 Post-it notes (to record observations from the activity)
Following the reading, ask students to discuss their drawings and ideas, and how these compared
to those shared by the author. Is there is anything the author included in her description of the
waters journey that they omitted from their drawing and vice versa?
Invite students to pair up and share their drawings with each other, suggesting modifications to
make in light of the story that was read.
Students remove a strip from the envelope at their station. They should read the strip and record
their step in the journey, and their destination. When you give the signal, students should go to
their destination. (Repeat this at least 5 times).
Students should then return to their seats and write a brief story, from a water drops point of view,
that describes the journey they just took during the water cycle.
Evaluation:
*As a summative evaluation, we will review the NAEP constructed-response assessment item scoring,
and student answers to a question about the water cycle. You will then revise the question applying
understandings from the Miller & Calfee reading (Making Thinking Visible) to create a prompt for student
expository writing. You will then modify the Science Writing Rubric provided by the authors.
References:
Schmid, Eleonore. (1989). The waters journey. New York: North-South Books.
National Research Council. (1996). The national science education standards. Washington, D.C.: National
Academy Press.
American Forest Foundation (1993). Project Learning Tree Environmental Education Activity Guide: Pre K8. Washington, DC: Author.