Middle School Inquiry Lab on the Water Cycle
In this lab students will create a model to demonstrate how water moves through the water cycle.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- How does water move through the water cycle?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
.svg)
Materials List:
- clay
- clear plastic rectangular container with lid
- water
- petri dish
- ice
- lamp (or sunlight if a sunny day)
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, students will use up most of their time to create a model of the water cycle. Using a container and modeling clay, students will create a mountain along the side of their container. Students will add water to their container and place the lid on top. Placing the container under a light, students will watch a video then diagram their container. Their diagram will have to include labels including runoff, evaporation, transpiration, etc.
CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING:
At this point in the lab, students will be checked for understanding by answering questions about their findings. Here is one that comes with the lab:
- If water from the ocean is evaporated into clouds, why aren’t raindrops saltwater like the ocean?
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- Where does the energy that powers the water cycle come from?
- On a mountain, which part of the water cycle is this an example of?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
NGSS: MS-ESS2-4 – Develop a model to describe the cycling of water through Earth’s systems driven by energy from the Sun and the force of gravity.
