Water Cycle

Well, we've been here before, a few times I believe, talking about The Water Cycle.  We are (very) slowly making our way through the kindergarten curriculum of My Father's World this summer.  It gives us something great to do on slow weeks (of which there have not been many), and is a good review for Nicole, while Hannah gets an introduction to Kindergarten.

A few weeks ago, we talked about The Water Cycle.  We did two really fun projects that turned out really well and became a great example of the water cycle.

The first example is a water cycle in a bag, and it really worked!

We put a little bit of water into a plastic cup and labeled the water line.  Then, we drew the water cycle on the front of a gallon zip top bag.  We carefully set the cup in the corner of the bag, symbolizing a source of water.

 Then, we taped the bag to a sunny window.  Our back windows get direct sunlight in the afternoons.

 About two days later, we could see a great example of condensation (clouds), and then water pooled in the corner of the bag (precipitation).

This was later that afternoon.

And a day or so later.

 We left our bags up for a couple of weeks and could very easily see the water cycle happening inside of our bags.  Great little project!

See the puddle at the corner of the bag. That's our "rain".  You can also see how much water evaporated, compared to our line on the cup

We also made a terrarium.  We put some small rocks in the bottom of a glass jar, then layed some moist soil and sand, leaving about the top third empty.  We put a few pieces of moss and some small plants into the soil (and a fake bug of course), then sealed the lid.  We left these out back for the sunlight to hit as well.  Well, it was like a little rain forest in a jar.  The moisture in the soil became condensation, and when the condensations got to heavy, it dripped down like rain.

Aren't they cute?

A couple of days later, we had 'clouds' and 'rain'.

Unrelated to the Water Cycle, our ants came in for our ant farm.

This completely creeped me out.  I was not a fan of keeping aggressive, biting ants in my home (because my instinct is to kill them!  However, they set out to work right away, and were quite interesting.

We ended up leaving them on the back porch.  Unfortunately, moisture got in and the ants  died within a week or so.  In case you never knew...I'm not that good with animals, however, I have to say....I'm glad those ants are dead!