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Water Cycle Reading and Writing

Educator Lesson Plan

Students will practice English language arts skills by listening to or reading a story about the water cycle and then writing a similar tale.

Objectives:

Students will respond to the story in ways that require:

  • reading, listening, and writing for information and understanding;
  • reading, listening, and writing for literary response and expression;
  • understanding that the water is recycled by natural processes including evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff; and
  • understanding that matter, including water, is made up of particles whose properties determine its observable characteristics.

Grade level:

Elementary (Grades 3-5)

Subject Areas:

English Language Arts, Science

Standards:

English Language Arts Standards 1, 2

Mathematics, Science, & Technology Standard 4

Skills:

  • Read and listen to acquire facts and ideas from texts.
  • Gather and organize information about environmental phenomena.
  • Write to interpret, apply, and transmit information.
  • Write for literary response and expression.

Vocabulary:

condensation, crest, evaporation, infiltration, molecule, precipitation, runoff, water cycle

Duration:

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Activity time: 15 minutes for reading; 30-45 minutes for writing

Materials:

Each student should have:

Background:

The water cycle describes the continuous circulation of water from water bodies and the land to the sky and back again. It is truly a cycle; there is no beginning or end. Water can change states-become a gas, liquid, or solid-at various places in the cycle.

The water cycle is powered by solar energy and gravity. The sun's heat causes water to evaporate into the atmosphere as water vapor. This gas then condenses into droplets that gravity pulls down to earth as precipitation and downhill back to the oceans as runoff. Some precipitation infiltrates the ground and becomes groundwater. It may stay there for millions of years, or bubble up in springs, or be taken up by plants and released back to the air through transpiration from their leaves. Water may also be frozen for centuries in snowpacks or glaciers before melting and rejoining the cycle.

There is about as much water on earth today as there was in the time of the dinosaurs. The water you drink today could have been in a waterhole used by dinosaurs, or frozen in the great glaciers that covered the Hudson Valley 15,000 years ago.

Activity:

  1. Introduce the lesson by telling students they will take a journey with Walter the water molecule. They will frolic in the ocean, float into the atmosphere, splash down on tree tops, slip between the leaves on the forest floor, and rush over waterfalls.
  2. Read the story aloud. Point out how Walter's adventures relate to the water cycle. Have students write their own stories about Walter's further adventures in the water cycle, using water cycle vocabulary (see introduction to the assignment at the end of the reading). Specify a length depending on the abilities of the students.

Assessment:

  • Collect and review students' stories.
  • Have students read stories aloud to the class.
  • Have students identify the states of water that they encounter daily (liquid in puddles; water vapor from your breath; ice in ice cubes).
  • Identify water cycle processes that Walter experienced.

Resources:

Berger, Melvin and Gilda. Water, Water Everywhere. A Discovery Readers Book: Ideals Children's Books, Nashville: 2003. Ages 5-9

Locker, Thomas. Water Dance. Voyager Books, New York: 2002. Ages 4-8

McKinney, Barbara. A Drop Around the World. Dawn Publications, Nevada City, California: 1998. Ages 4-8.

River of Wordsis an annual international poetry and art contest for K-12 students on the theme of watersheds. Visit their website, www.riverofwords.org, for more information about the contest and an interdisciplinary curriculum guide on watersheds. In the Hudson Valley, staff at NYSDEC's Stony Kill Farm Environmental Education Center skfarm@gw.dec.state.ny.us conduct River of Words watershed poetry lessons for grades 3-12 and workshops for teachers.