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Lesson plan Grade 5 Science

Where the Water Waits at Wistleton: A Two-System Model Lesson

A grade 5 science lesson in which students build a labeled model of water's stops above and below a fictional town, comparing days in the air with centuries in rock.

Objectives

  1. Students will build a labeled model showing water moving between the atmosphere and a pond.
  2. Students will build a labeled model showing water moving from rainfall into gravel and rock.
  3. Students will explain why water can leave the air in days but stay underground for centuries.

Vocabulary

Water vapor
Water vapor is water in the form of an invisible gas mixed into the air. There is always some water vapor around you, even when the sky is completely clear.
Aquifer
An aquifer is an underground layer of rock, sand, or gravel that holds water in the tiny spaces between its grains. Wells reach down into aquifers to bring water up to the surface.

Also: atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere

Teacher overview

Wistleton is a fictional town with a shallow pond at the low end of Main Street and a long gravel ridge above it. This lesson has students build one model in two panels: the first panel shows water leaving the pond as vapor and returning as rain, and the second shows that same rain soaking through gravel into cracked rock, where it may sit for a very long time. Water spends about nine days in the atmosphere on average, while water in deep groundwater can stay for centuries or longer, and the contrast between those two waiting times is what makes the model worth drawing. The misconception the lesson corrects is the widespread student picture of groundwater as an underground lake or river with open water and a current, which leads students to assume that water underground moves as fast as water in a stream.

Procedure

Hook (6 min): Ask students to name every place a single drop of water could be sitting right now. Record the list. Then ask which place on the list would hold that drop the longest and take a show of hands on the top three answers before revealing anything.

Direct instruction (12 min): Introduce the two waiting times. Explain that water spends about nine days in the air on average before it falls again, while water that sinks deep into rock can stay for centuries or even thousands of years. Name the three systems the class will label today: the atmosphere is the air, the geosphere is the rock and soil, and the hydrosphere is the water itself. Say plainly that the assessment for this grade looks at two systems at a time, so each panel of the model will show one pair.

Model build (16 min): In pairs, students fold chart paper into two panels. On the left panel they draw Wistleton Pond, the air above it, and arrows for water leaving as vapor and returning as rain, labeling the pair of systems that panel shows. On the right panel they draw a side view of the gravel ridge with rain landing on it, arrows going down through gravel into cracked rock, and a well pulling water back up. Blue sticky notes mark water and brown sticky notes mark rock and soil.

Handout (10 min): Students answer the five questions on the Student Handout using their own model as the reference. Tell them that a question asking them to point at their drawing expects a labeled arrow, not a sentence alone.

Closure and formative check (6 min): Hold up one student model and ask the class to signal thumbs up if both panels label their pair of systems, and a flat hand if one panel is missing a label. If more than a third of the class shows a flat hand, model the labeling on the board and give pairs two minutes to fix their own. End by asking one pair to say aloud what is really underneath Wistleton, in place of the underground lake many students first picture.

Where the Water Waits at Wistleton: A Two-System Model Lesson — Grade 5 Science
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

Use your own two-panel model of Wistleton to answer these questions.

  1. Water leaves Wistleton Pond and rises into the air as vapor. Name the two Earth systems that this arrow connects, and point to the arrow on your model.
  2. Water stays in the air about nine days on average before it falls again. Water in deep rock can stay for hundreds of years. Which of these two waits longer, and by how much longer in rough terms?
  3. On your second panel, find the arrow showing rain moving from the air into the gravel of the ridge. Name the two Earth systems that arrow connects.
  4. A student says that the water under Wistleton sits in an underground lake with open water and waves. Use your model to explain what is really down there instead.
  5. Rain falls on the ridge, soaks in, and slowly dissolves tiny bits of the rock it passes through. Describe one way the air above Wistleton changes the rock below it.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: The hydrosphere and the atmosphere. The pond is water, which is the hydrosphere, and the vapor rises into the air, which is the atmosphere. The arrow should point upward from the pond surface and carry both labels.
  2. Answer: The water in deep rock waits far longer. Nine days is a little over a week, while water in deep rock can wait hundreds of years, so the underground wait is thousands of times longer. Accept any answer that names the rock and shows the student understands the size of the difference.
  3. Answer: The atmosphere and the geosphere. Rain falls out of the air, which is the atmosphere, and moves into the gravel and rock, which is the geosphere. Accept a labeled downward arrow with both names written next to it.
  4. Answer: Water sits in the spaces between grains of gravel and in narrow cracks in the rock. There is no open lake and no wave, only wet gravel and wet cracks, which is why the water moves slowly and can stay for so long.
  5. Answer: Rain from the air soaks into the ridge and dissolves small amounts of the rock as it passes through, which slowly widens the cracks and carries minerals along with the water. Accept any answer that traces water from the air into the rock and names a change to the rock.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students a partly drawn model with the pond, the ridge, and the well already sketched, so their work is labeling and adding arrows rather than composing the whole picture. Provide a word bank strip with atmosphere, geosphere, and hydrosphere printed with a small icon beside each.

Extension

Ask these students to add a third panel showing what would change if Wistleton paved the top of the ridge for a parking lot, with arrows for the water that would run off instead of soaking in. Have them write three sentences naming which pair of systems that change affects most and why the well below might yield less water.

ELL supports

Pre-teach vapor, soak, and cracked rock with a demonstration: a wet paper towel drying on the radiator for vapor, and a sponge held under a dripping cup for soaking. Allow students to answer questions 4 and 5 with a labeled drawing plus a short phrase rather than complete sentences.

Extensions

Have students find out whether their own community draws water from a well, a river, or a reservoir, using a printed water quality report or a utility page the teacher supplies, and add a fourth labeled panel to their model showing that local source with its own pair of systems named.