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House Creek Elementary students learn about the water cycle

Special to the Leader-Press

 

As rainstorms rumbled through Copperas Cove and Central Texas last week, it was a great opportunity for House Creek Elementary students in teachers Denise Stevens’ and Samantha Monfort-Miller’s classes to apply what they have learned about the water cycle.

As the storms moved out of the area and the sun appeared, causing temperatures to climb, conditions provided a perfect illustration of a water cycle visual, said Stevens.

“This lesson was selected for students to visually see how water can change its state when heated,” Stevens said. “They can see the movement of water in each process and apply this understanding a local rainstorm or to large scale bodies of water such as the ocean.”

After learning about the water cycle through text, students made their own visuals using clear airtight bags to draw representations of the water cycle. The students drew the main energy source, the sun, in the top corner of the bag with the collection of water at the bottom of the bag.

"Don't forget to draw the sun,” student Noah Haag reminded himself by speaking aloud and recalling what he had learned. “It's the energy source."

Students used arrows to demonstrate the water moving up as it evaporates, turning into water vapor, and a cloud at the top was drawn to show the process of condensation. Finally, students drew precipitation falling from the cloud and back to the collection point. The bags were filled slightly with water and hung in classroom windows for student observation as the Texas sun shone through, heating up the bags. Students recorded their observations on lab forms.

Student Jaelah Wyatt pointed excitedly at her bag as she observed it in the classroom window.

"I can see the precipitation,” Wyatt said. “It looks like it's raining."  

Students struggled recalling the vocabulary for each process including evaporation, condensation, and precipitation that they learned during their reading assignments but were able to easily remember the different phases of the water cycle once they witnessed the processes at work.

“It was rewarding to see the students observe the water cycle occurring in the window and point out the condensation or precipitation,” Monfort-Miller said.Students had a difficult time drawing on the bags with a marker, but overall, the project went very smoothly.”

The weather pattern known as La Niña, which occurs when tropical waters in the eastern Pacific become cooler than normal, typically leads to warmer, drier conditions in Central Texas. Monday’s rain eliminated some of Central Texas’s dry conditions as well as across the state where 96.3 percent of Texas is experiencing some level of drought according to U.S. Drought Monitor data.

 

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