Water, Water, Water!

This week has been an intro to water- the 3 phases of water, the water cycle, and water pollution. Here is a set of different activities we've been doing all week:

Earth's Drinking Water Supply
About 70% of earth is covered in water, but how much of that is actually fit for human consumption? Despite being a renewable resource, the amount of drinkable water on earth is very limited!

A great visual demo is to take 1 L (1,000 ml) of water to represent all the water on earth and compare it to the amount of clean, freshwater.

1. Ask kids where they think most water on earth is located (oceans). 97% is saltwater from the oceans. Explain why this is not drinkable. Remove 97% of water (970 ml) which leaves you with 30 ml.
(hint: it is easier just to pour out 30 ml into a smaller container. I reused old plastic containers and marked off the measurements so that kids can pour and measure themselves. You could also use measure cups if you want the kids to practice understanding measurements)

2. Explain that the 30 ml represents freshwater. Where is freshwater found? (lakes, rivers, streams, our faucets, the ground, and GLACIERS!) Depending on age, most kids won't think of glaciers or know what they are.

3. Explain glaciers make water inaccessible and take away 24 ml. You are left with 6 ml that represent the other sources of freshwater. Some of these are polluted waterways... and some are hard to get to like deep groundwater.

4. Use a pipette to take out a single drop- the amount of drinkable water (0.003%) Conclude by talking about water consumption and conservation in the home and school.



Water Cycle in a Bag
I found an example of this on Pinterest. So far it has worked moderately well considering we haven't had the sun out very much in the past few days.Since we have TONS AND TONS of snow, we started by putting snow in the bags, so in addition to the evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, we also witnessed the melting process! You can't see very well but there was actually some foggy condensation near the top of these bags at the time.

The Incredible Journey

This very popular Project Wet Activity  teaches kids the movement of water, places it goes, and where it stays the longest. Children imagine they are all water droplets. By rolling dice at each of the nine stations, they are directed on where they should travel next. To document their journey, everyone starts with a pipe cleaner and collects a colored bead at every station they go to. By the end, everyone has a bracelet to take home and you can sit the kids down to talk about patterns or frequency of colors in their bracelet.

Talking points:

• Every droplet has a unique journey, no two bracelets are the same
• Sometimes water droplets stay in one place for a very long time (i.e. ocean or atmosphere)
• Some places only collect small amounts of water and remove it fairly quickly, meaning some kids may never have get to that station or maybe only once (i.e. plant, animal)

Tips/Lessons Learned:

• You can use any string in place of pipe cleaners, however pipe cleaners are best because the beads stay on very well as the kids move around and no need to keep tying knots at the end of the string.
• Make sure you have enough beads in EVERY COLOR, even the ones that the probability of getting are very low. I used left over beads and assigned colors based on which beads I had the least and most of with the respective stations that should be reached most often or least often. Don't rely on that. I almost ran out of black beads for my animal station!
• Explain to the kids ahead of why certain dice don't have all the pictures on them (i.e water from the ocean cannot go straight to groundwater, it must first travel through other places) If you have kids with OCD or ADHD this might frustrate them, and they'll probably begin "cheating" to go to the stations they haven't been able to reach.
• This is the PERFECT activity for an after-school program or other public events & festivals or programs where kids can drop in and out as they please. This activity does not require all kids to stop and start at the same time, everyone works at their own pace, and the activity can be continued on for a long time (they can make multiple bracelets) or shorter time.

Solid-Liquid-Gas Tag
This is a game I made up. The goal is to teach kids how fast water molecules move when in different phases.
I took two flashlights and covered them with red and blue material. If you have flashlights with colored bulbs that probably works better. Otherwise test out different materials over your flashlight. Depending on the intensity of your flashlight, certain materials may work better than others. Colored cellophane, ribbon, or other thin fabrics will probably suffice.

Rules:
The tagger has the two flashlights. The red light represents heat from the sun and the blue is cold temperatures. Teach kids that as ice molecules they barely move, they vibrate a little in place but for the most part everyone should be frozen still and close together. As ice melts, molecules begin to spread apart.. kids can start to slowly walk around each other. As water evaporates it enters the gas stage: everyone can start to run and spread out. Point the colored flashlight on each kid to "tag" them. Keep going back and forth between the stages.

A few things I quickly discovered.... after a while they kids will ask if they can be the tagger. Once that happened we lost the concept of having to shine the same colored light more than once on a person to get them from solid to gas or visa verse. We essentially lost that liquid step and it became a traditional freeze tag, everyone was either frozen or running. But most of the kids playing with me that day were Kindergartners and for their age level they did pretty well, especially in the beginning when I was in control of the lights. It helps, especially if you let other kids become the tagger, to call out what stage we are in. The whole time I was narrating, "you turned to ice"", ""the sun melts you, you are a liquid", etc. We also had a couple older kids (3-4th grade) join us later on. They were a bit more rambunctious. You might want to make additional rules like you cannot hide behind or under things, no pushing, etc. Obviously this activity is best outdoors, we were inside, what helped me keep them under control was to set boundaries that no one could step out of.




Songs About Water
There are tons of great videos and songs about water and the water cycle. Here are some I used or particularly like:

Who made this mess?
We ran out of time to do this activity because of all the snow days but learned it at a educator workshop and I really love it.

Tell kids everyone has an infinite amount of money to build their dream home and and property which sits along the Hudson River (or another relevant water body in your area). Give everyone a piece of paper to draw their house (make sure you remind them to place water at the edge of their property! AKA bottom of the page). When complete, place all the houses facing into each other so that there is the river in the middle. Talk about the sources of pollution that could be entering the river. I suggest you make your own as well. You could draw yours one of two ways: make it really crazy and include things that would cause pollution that the kids may not have thought of like a a zoo or farm and factory. OR make yours a representative of a Sustainable Shoreline- one that is environmentally conscious and  helps protect.
Pick a downstream and upstream location and begin asking each kid to explain what is on their property, as kids mention things that contribute to pollution use pompoms, string, or even ripped up pieces of paper to demonstrate pollution sources entering the river. Talk about what happens to the water downstream of pollution.

Common sources:

• Oil from cars, boats, planes, etc
• Chemicals from pools, hot tubs
• Fertilizers from perfect green grass and gardens
• Other chemicals or sewage from far-fetched things like factories, farms,  restaurants, shopping stores (YES kids will think to put these on their imaginary property!!)
• Trash, bottles, cans

Glacier Ice vs. Ocean Ice
I also didn't have time for this one, but I hope to tie it into a climate change week instead.

Fill two bowls with water. Place ice directly in one. In the second use something like a smaller bowl upside down to simulate an island or land. Place ice cubes on top of the land. Have kids measure the water level in both. Place under a lamp or in the sun. Return to when the ice has melted and have the kids measure water levels again. Talk about the difference between land and sea ice melting.



Water Quality Testing
I love the LaMotte Water Monitoring Kits. I've used them at numerous places that I've worked. They are very simple to use, just pipette water into the tubes, put in the tablets for the parameter you want to test for (DO, pH, phosphate, etc), shake, and compare colors to the chart provided in the kits.  If you have older kids (middle school and high school) you might want to look into better testing kits, but for young kids (K-3) this is perfect for helping them understand the basics of healthy vs unhealthy water for fish.

Because I mostly cater to K-2 we prepared for water quality tests by coloring in these Hudson River Activity Books from NYS Dept. of Health. Here is a PDF copy but you can easily get some hard copies by contacting them. I like these books because they touch on the concept of water quality and impacts to fish and humans. It got them thinking and talking about fish and prepare for our water tests we did after snack.

I ALWAYS like to have a white board nearby when I do these tests in order to have kids 'record' our findings. In past instances, I've always collected a water sample from the Hudson. Because everything frozen and also impossible for me to easily access and natural water bodies from our center, I brought it some water from my fish tank. This worked out really well because I proposed a "mystery that needed to be solved." As many of my kids knew, I recently got some guppy fish, and a couple have not been doing well. We conducted a couple of the tests and found that my D.O. is very low! Looks like I need a better aeration system!

Now I'm almost positive our results aren't accurate, because of a couple different mess ups, however the key was to get them to understand what influences healthy water, what dissolved oxygen and pH is, and what the safe ranges are for fish to survive.