I am student teaching at a school in philadelphia. It is very hard to keep the kids focused and quiet during any lesson. I now have to do a lesson on the water cycle and need help. I have to explain to them evaporation and condensation in a way that not only they will understand but will also be entertaining. This students have to be hands on at all times or I will lose them. I read all about the water cycle song and that is wonderful but I need to find a way to demostrate evaporation and condensation to them. I only have 45 minutes to do this lesson so I am unable to watch and wait hours to observe water evaporating. Any suggestions? I could use all the help you can offer!!

[tish]

I took in my hot plate and boiled water and held a mirror over it. That will show evaporation and condensation. I also heard someone make a water cycle bracelet for them to understand the cycle. They used a plastic type of string and strung different color beads on it to represent the different steps of the water cycle. I can't remember it all,but the sun could be a yellow bead and so forth. Walmart has a good section to buy all that you need for this. I will check with my other teachers and report back to you tomorrow.

I did a cute art project on the water cycle a few years back.

Using a 12x18 blue construction paper as the background students cut and glued a landform out of green paper on the bottom of the paper going only halfway across. Then they drew ocean waves with chalk on the other side on the bottom. They cut out a sun and glued it (needed for evaporation).

We pulled apart cotton balls to glue for clouds and then drops of glitter glue for rain. We used the chalk to draw evaporation lines going up from the water to the clouds.

Finally they cut out pretyped labels that said 'The Water Cycle", "evaporation", "precipitation" and "condensation" from bright colored copy paper and glued it to the picture.
Another day they wrote about the water cycle process and displayed the writing and picture together.

I don't know how well this translates in print but they really did come out cute. Good luck.

[Jonesy]

I have my second grade class make a picture of the water cycle by drawing water - collection - drawing wavy arrows to indicate evaporation - arrows to condensation -use cotton balls colored with charcoal gray to show condensation - arrows to percipitation - paper punched circles (blue) for raindrops - arrows to the ground - we label each part and then write a water cycle story to go with the picture.
If you want to you can have some child do raindrops and some snowflakes. Great Fun! Hope this is helpful

[Christina21]

When I teach the stages of the water cycle I have them use their hands. Hands sides and wave them up (evaporation), clap together to show forming cloud (condensation), wiggle fingers down (precipitation). We do this a few times, it gets them moving.
Also for a quick observation on condensation we use 2 cups w/ room temp water. We then add ice to one of the cups and watch what happens to the outside. For evaporation we take 2 cups and put one in a dark space and one in a sunny spot. Both cups are marked to the water level. We then go back and see what has changed.
Hope any of this helps.

[Angie]

See if you can get your hands on the Water Cycle Boogie by the Banana Slug String Band. I used that with my class and they love it. It has a chorus that is really easy to remember and the verses have a lot of information. I have it on video and we watched it a couple of times. I also had my kids pretend they were a drop of water and we evaporated (stood up), condensed (went to the middle of the room and squeezed together real tight), and precipitated (went back to our seats- I let different kids choose which form of precipitation we would be.) Hope this helps.

[GrandeDame]

The tune is "My Darling Clementine"
Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation on my mind.
They are part of the Water Cycle and they happen all the time!