If you were a drop of water, what would you do? Where would you go? How would you get there? Would you float about the earth in cloud? Would you hang out in a body of water such as a puddle, pond, lake, or ocean? Would you splash your way down a mountainside or through a valley with the help of a creek, a stream, or a river? Would you rest in the soil, quench the thirst of an animal, or become part of a plant as it grows? Would you precipitate? Turn to gas and evaporate? Perhaps you would do all of these things...
Tr. Lindsay read to us today about the water cycle and helped us play a bead-stringing game as we pretended to be drops of water moving through the water cycle. As we moved from one place to another, we had to roll a die to determine our destinations. As we moved from place to place according to the roll of the die we added a bead to our string from each destination visited. At the end of the game our string of multicolored beads was a visual representation of the story of our journey through the water cycle.
After that, it was off to the stream with our parent volunteers. We navigated our way upstream over rocks to an area with large puddles and shallow moving water. There we flipped over rocks and scooped up water looking for living creatures in the water. How lucky we were to see tadpoles today in addition to a few snails and mysterious creepy crawlies that moved too quickly to be captured and identified! Tr. Lindsay set up microscopes for us to magnify things we collected for a closer look; magnifying boxes were great for holding tadpoles while we looked for the appearance of emerging body parts.
The field trip stimulated our senses with the colors, textures, and sounds of the forest, challenged our physical bodies as we crawled over a fallen tree and scrambled over slippery rocks in the stream, filled our lungs with fresh air, and danced under a canopy of trees. Beneath cloudy skies and intermittent raindrops from the trees above, we stretched our minds to think about how water moves over land, changes form, and is a part of all living things.
A warm thank you to our parent volunteers for joining us today!
