Water Cycle: A Learning 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:
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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)
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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 Water’s Journey – a children’s 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)
Goals/objectives of the lesson:
Students will develop the following knowledge and abilities related to processes, content, and
understandings about science:
Science Processes:
Science Content:
Students will …
Students will describe how:
 Simulate the path that
 The water cycle shows the
water takes through the
cycling of water in the
water cycle.
environment.
 Draw inferences about the  Water can take on many
movement of water
forms in the environment,
through the environment
including solid, liquid, and
gas
The Nature of Science

Scientists develop physical,
conceptual, and
mathematical models to
describe, explain, and
predict phenomena
Engage/Encountering the Idea:
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Ask students, “What is a cycle?” Invite them to name some cycles that are a part of their life (e.g.,
morning, afternoon, night; winter, spring, summer, and fall).
Ask, “How many of you have heard about the water cycle?” (Most students will probably raise their
hand.) Begin by asking students to draw a picture of the water cycle.
Tell students that the water cycle is a model for thinking about the journey that water takes—
explain that you are going to read a book that will describe more about The Water’s Journey.
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
water’s 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.
Exploring the Idea:
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What would it be like if we were a drop of water? What would that experience be like? Tell students
you are going to play a game of chance, in which they will get to be a drop of water.
Introduce the seven stations to students (mountain, ocean, cloud, stream, groundwater, animal,
and plant).
Divide students up into fairly even groups, and assign them to each station.
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 drop’s point of view,
that describes the journey they just took during the water cycle.
Explanation/ Organizing the Idea:
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Ask students to pair up and share their stories. How are their journeys alike? How do they differ?
Have students share similarities and differences between their stories and their classmate’s.
Write the names of the seven stations on the chalkboard, and provide each student with 5 post-it
notes. Instruct students to create a post-it by each of the five stations they visited to create a class
bar graph. Then, discuss the following questions:
1) In the game, which stations seem to be visited most? What can we infer from this?
2) Can you think of other parts of the water cycle that were not included in the game?
(puddles, lakes, etc.) Where might they be included in the cycle?
3) What do you think would happen if all the Earth’s water stayed in the oceans? In the
clouds? Why do you think water does not stay in one place?
4) How do you think the water cycle is important to plants and animals?
Extend/ Applying the Idea:
 Ask students revisit their original drawings, considering it in terms of the pathways they and their
classmates took during the game. Students can pair up and discuss their ideas together or in small
groups to decide what they would change in order to more accurately represent the water cycle.
 Have each individual student create a new drawing of the water cycle, and to write a description of
how it differs from their original drawing (What did they learn?). Collect both the original and
revised drawings from all students.
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 water’s 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.