Are you teaching the water cycle in your classroom or homeschool? The water cycle is a complex process with many stages that all work together to provide the freshwater crucial to our survival. Hands-on water cycle activities are useful to demonstrate the different steps in the water cycle and can make your lessons memorable for students. From measuring infiltration to calculating runoff, these 5 water cycle activities will enrich your lessons and deepen understanding.
A Note For Teachers: The activities covered in this post come from three of my complete units: the Water Cycle Unit, Science on the River Unit, and Soil Science Unit. You can purchase these units to receive all the printable worksheets, handouts, and diagrams for teaching these activities and more (plus you’ll support this blog with your purchase! ❤️).
1. Collect Precipitation
Precipitation happens when water falls to the Earth’s surface in liquid or solid form. This includes water in the form of snowflakes, hail, sleet, or liquid droplets (rain). Precipitation falls onto land or into bodies of water. A lot of precipitation falls directly into the oceans.
Building a DIY rain gauge from a plastic bottle is a fun, hands-on activity to explore this key water cycle process. You just need an empty plastic soda or water bottle plus a few other household items!
But remember, rain is far from the only type of precipitation. If you live somewhere that receives snow in the winter, you can also collect and measure snowfall!
2. Observe Evaporation
Evaporation is the process of water changing from a liquid to a gas, called water vapor. Evaporation may happen anywhere that there is water; water evaporates from oceans, lakes, streams, soils, and even from raindrops as they fall.
Measuring evaporation is an easy activity that brings the process to life for your students. The basic idea of this lab is that you will have two jars, one with a lid and one without. You will observe the change in the water level in the two jars over several days due to evaporation.
3. Measure Soil Infiltration
Infiltration is when water seeps from the land’s surface down into the soil. This happens when rain falls onto the soil and seeps in. Water also infiltrates downwards through the bottoms of some lakes and streams. Conversely, groundwater may also flow upwards sometimes, into gaining streams and springs.
Measuring infiltration rates in different types of soils is a hands-on activity that helps students explore how water interacts with the ground. This soil infiltration activity also ties in perfectly with studies of porosity and permeability.
The general idea is that you’ll hammer a piece of tubing into the ground, so that the bottom forms a seal with the soil. Then, you’ll fill the tube with water, and time how long it takes the water to seep into the soil. The rate it seeps will vary between different types and textures of soil, so try this activity in a few different locations (e.g., sandy soil, loamy soil, organic-rich soil, etc…).
4. Calculate Run Off in Streams
Runoff is when water flows downhill. This includes rivers, streams, and any water flowing over the Earth’s surface. Runoff happens thanks to gravity – surface water always flows from high to low elevation. You won’t see a stream flowing uphill. Little streams start high up in the mountains. They flow downhill, joining together to make big rivers. Rivers make their way to the ocean and mix with salt water.
You and your students can measure and calculate the rate of runoff in a small stream. More specifically, you can take simple measurements and use them to calculate the velocity of the flowing water. From there, you can calculate the stream’s discharge (e.g., gallons per minute). This stream measurements activity combines math, measurements, and science, making it a perfect addition to your classroom or homeschool.
5. Model Where Water is Stored
It’s hard to imagine just how little freshwater exists on Earth compared to saltwater. If you’re teaching the water cycle, your students might be amazed to learn that less than 3% of the Earth’s water is freshwater—the rest is saltwater. Fortunately, you can do a hands-on freshwater learning activity that uses simple kitchen measurements to help your students visualize these proportions. This freshwater visualization activity is a powerful way to help students truly understand how rare freshwater is!
Subscribers to this blog can download free printable directions for this visualization activity on the free resources page of my website. The free resources page is a collection of dozens of printable science & nature learning resources designed by me – including printable activity directions, my hand-drawn water cycle diagram, and much more! To access the free resources page, subscribe to my email newsletter. It’s a monthly digest of new blog posts about science and science education like this one, as well as occasional updates when I release a new unit or throw a sale in my shop.
Study the Water Cycle with Wild Earth Lab!
There’s no need to scramble to put together the perfect worksheets and handouts for these water cycle activities – I’ve already created them for you! The activities from this post come from these three printable units, available in my shop:
Explore more lessons from Wild Earth Lab:
If you enjoyed this post, I know you will love trying my other printable science and nature units in your classroom too!
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