Learning about the water cycle turned out to be one of our favorite lessons so far. We went as far as to make a song up for it but I’ll spare you having to listen to it. I mean, we think it’s pretty epic but some may disagree.
This is what we used to start off the lesson. We went through naming each phase and what that word meant. Condensation, Precipitation, Collection, Evaporation…I can’t even say it anymore without singing the song.
Next up was experiment time. We filled a jar with about 3/4 water then added shaving cream to the top to represent clouds. Then we had a separate cup with water in it (dyed blue with a few drops of food coloring) and we observed how long our “cloud” could hold the “evaporated” water before becoming too full and releasing the rain/precipitation.
I really wish I had a dropper to do this but we worked with what we had. We couldn’t track how many drops it took very accurately but it did take majority of the syringe before you would see the blue makes its way through our cloud and into the water.
We experimented with how much longer it took to see the rain when the cloud was bigger…
And how quickly it came through when the cloud was smaller
It really was such a fun lesson and experiment. I like to have less of a “lesson” when it comes to science and more of a discussion and hands on activities. We talked about the water cycle for 2 days before taking out quiz. We also did an experiment to see how long it took for water to evaporate for a larger bowl of water vs a puddle on the ground.
Hope you got some good ideas from this post of what you can do with your kids! Stay tuned for a lot more homeschooling tips, lessons and ideas coming soon.
xoxo,
Jenny
Homestead Creations 