Please visit the Water Cycle Symbaloo for fun practice.
Tonight: Students need to complete the summary on what they learned from their notes and begin learning the steps of the water cycle. Now, when I say learn, I do not mean memorizing the steps. I told students today they can memorize evaporation, condensation, precipitation runoff...and go over and over again but that's not learning. Students need to know what is happening to the water in each step.
Evaporation is when the sun heats up water in rivers or lakes or the ocean and turns it into vapor or steam. The water vapor or steam leaves the river, lake or ocean and goes into the air.
Water vapor in the air gets cold and changes back into liquid, forming clouds. This is called condensation.
Precipitation occurs when so much water has condensed that the air cannot hold it anymore. The clouds get heavy and water falls back to the earth in the form of rain, hail, sleet or snow.
Runoff: When water falls back to earth as precipitation, it may fall back in the oceans, lakes or rivers or it may end up on land. When it ends up on land, it will either soak into the earth and become part of the “ground water” that plants and animals use to drink or it may run over the soil and collect in the oceans, lakes or rivers where the cycle starts
all over again.
Transpiration is a new term which simply put means the evaporation of water from the plant leaves.
