Water Cycle Worksheet: Wren and Sitka Nature Investigation, Grades 3-5
There is no new water. The water in your child's glass has been through dinosaurs, oceans, clouds, and somebody's garden hose, and the amount on Earth has not changed in a very long time. That is the idea this sheet is built to land.
By the end of this
- Your child can explain why we cannot make more water, only move it around the cycle
Your child is ready for this if they
- Reads a short paragraph without help
- Writes a sentence in their own words
- Will go outside and look at something for five minutes
That list matters more than the age we printed on it. You know which of the two is true of your child.
Heat from the sun turns liquid water into invisible vapor and lifts it into the air. That is evaporation, and it happens most from oceans, lakes, and puddles.
Plants add to it. Water pulled up through roots evaporates out of leaves, which is the transpiration from the tree lesson doing double duty.
High up, air is colder. Vapor cools and turns back into tiny droplets around specks of dust. That is condensation, and a cloud is what a crowd of those droplets looks like.
When droplets combine until they are too heavy to float, they fall as rain, snow, sleet, or hail. That is precipitation.
Water on the ground runs downhill into streams and rivers, or soaks in and becomes groundwater. Either way it heads back toward the sea and the whole thing starts again.
What is inside
- 01Water Goes in Circles — the teaching page
- 02Water Goes in Circles — the work page, answerable from the teaching page
- 03Take it outside: Put a small dish of water outside in the sun and mark the level with a pen.
Standards alignment, for a portfolio or a state filing
2 alignments. Copy what your state asks for and ignore the rest — this is here for the paperwork, not for the teaching.
| Framework | Code | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| NGSS | 5-ESS2-1 | |
| NGSS | 5-ESS2-2 |