Mrs. Eckroat's Kindergarten: What If You Were In a Raindrop?--UPDATED

On Thursday, our Water Expedition took us up North to learn about the Great Lakes ... the children learned that if you take the first letter from each Great Lake, it spells HOMES ... I did a mini lesson with them about acrostic poems. Have them show you how to make one using their first or last name. They also learned how the Great Lakes were formed .... ask them to tell you!

The Great Lakes
H uron

O ntario

M ichigan

E rie

S uperior

As an introduction to the Water Cycle and reviewing Water Filtration, we watched The Magic School Bus episode - Wet All Over. Miss Frizzle takes her class on a journey ... the children are put inside droplets of water and evaporate into the clouds ... the clouds move and the children inside their raindrops come down in the ocean, a puddle in London, and then finally in the water filtration system near their school. After watching the movie, the children wanted to emulate the movie and become raindrops ... they had many cool ideas!!! I was planning on making waxed paper and corn syrup raindrops with them ... but brainstorming we came up with a really FUN idea!!! On Friday morning the children completed the writing prompt "If I was in a raindrop" in their writing journals. I then took pictures of every student in a pose showing how they would look inside a raindrop. We made the corn syrup raindrops and I put their pictures inside .... I made copies of the pages from their writing journals, added a storm cloud and a lake -- this was a really fun project! I'm really proud of the kids coming up with the idea to somehow get themselves inside a raindrop!

Ask the children about the about the Water Cycle and see if they can share their knowledge with you!

The raindrops are falling into Lake MANARA!

UPDATED .... we've added the Explorer River, Wind, Sun, and we are NOW EVAPORATING, up into smaller wispy clouds!

To complete the Water Cycle the children said that they needed to EVAPORATE .... so they cut up their picture into small pieces ... showing the water vaporizing and changing to a gas. I cut vapor-like pieces out of wax paper and the children placed their cut up pictures into the Evaporating Water.

We added the wind and sun that play a role in the evaporation of water.

And some puffy, white clouds for the water to once again, begin to Condense ...

The children had a great time making this depiction of the Water Cycle!