Whales Explore The Water Cycle & Water Conservation
/In our continuing exploration of weather, the Whales took a closer look at what happens to water when it falls from clouds as rain, snow or ice. We performed a play that allowed us to become little drops of water! We floated on a blue ocean (the meeting carpet), then began to rise up slowly as we evaporated higher and higher (up onto our chairs!). We condensed together into one big rain cloud, and then fell gently to the ground.
The next day, we had a special guest teacher, Ms. Veronica, who shared many different varieties of trees, and the corresponding seeds from which they sprouted. Whales learned many new things about how trees mature, and the special qualities that make each tree unique. We got to be "seed detectives" and try to match each tree with the correct seed. We also used our high resolution Proscope to search for stomata in the leaves of the trees. We talked about how trees experience a kind of evaporation called transpiration (kind of like when we sweat!) and they play a role in the water cycle too!
With Earth Day coming up, Whales talked about water conservation. We conducted an experiment to see if we could clean dirty water. We discovered that it's not very easy to clean water once it's dirty. We decided that since the water we have on earth is all the water we'll ever have, we should probably take extra special care of it, and not waste it!
While we were busy studying rain, we made rain sticks! We plan to have a concert for other ELC classes soon. We are pretty sure that all our talk of rain and the water cycle brought on the big storm we had Thursday night, and all the rain we experienced on Friday. That was a good thing since we had an umbrella walk scheduled for the day. After reading the gorgeous book Umbrella, we headed outside to listen to the sound of rain bouncing off our umbrellas. We had to be really quiet to hear the sound, and it was beautiful!
