Water cycle
This past week, the kids accepted a challenge from me: they had to design a water cycle system, that could reasonably be built in the school with easily attained materials, that would include the following elements: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration (water absorbing into the ground, or dirt), and runoff. Within a few minutes, the class had begun to put together a design for a system involving a boiling pot of water, some plastic tubing, and a container of dirt with a filter beneath it... On Friday morning, we built it in the kitchen. Alas—the evaporation worked, and we saw some condensation in the tubing, as well—but our water never quite made it all the way through the tubes to the precipitation/infiltration stage, despite an effort to expedite the process by adding ice packs to the tubing. This is one of the things I love about the Summers-Knoll way of learning: it's all right to fail. It can be very instructive! After our water cycle didn't work the way the kids planned, they took some time to write in their theme notebooks about what went wrong, what went right, and how they thought they could improve the system. Perhaps we'll try again, sometime, with a few modifications!
This past week, the kids accepted a challenge from me: they had to design a water cycle system, that could reasonably be built in the school with easily attained materials, that would include the following elements: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration (water absorbing into the ground, or dirt), and runoff. Within a few minutes, the class had begun to put together a design for a system involving a boiling pot of water, some plastic tubing, and a container of dirt with a filter beneath it... On Friday morning, we built it in the kitchen. Alas—the evaporation worked, and we saw some condensation in the tubing, as well—but our water never quite made it all the way through the tubes to the precipitation/infiltration stage, despite an effort to expedite the process by adding ice packs to the tubing. This is one of the things I love about the Summers-Knoll way of learning: it's all right to fail. It can be very instructive! After our water cycle didn't work the way the kids planned, they took some time to write in their theme notebooks about what went wrong, what went right, and how they thought they could improve the system. Perhaps we'll try again, sometime, with a few modifications!
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