The Water Cycle

Visit to Te Manawa

Today we went to Te Manawa to learn about wonderful water. This is part of our Inquiry Unit about Water. We listened as Anne explained some of the activities and we tried some experiments with water. Read our comments and you will see some of the learning we did. It was a fantastic experience.

I enjoyed the morning and learned that water can drop from the clouds and can come back up again. This is part of the water cycle. (Charlotte)

The iceberg floats but most of it is under the water. (Ezrah, Jasmine, Thomas and Blake)

Water has a skin. (Connor)

When you put ice in water it gets smaller because the water is not as cold as the ice. (Matthew and Ben)

Most of the water in the world is in the ocean. (Ambrosio)

In the world we have a small amount of fresh water and lots of salty ocean water. (Joshua and Patrick)

We are using old water that we have already used but it has been recycled through the water cycle. (Hayley)

There is more water than land on earth. (Fletcher)

If you put ice in a jar and leave it, it will turn back into water. (Kayla and Nicholas)

I learned that when we put the ice in the water it shrunk. (Charlyse)

The water that we poured on the concrete went up to the sky and came down again as rain. (Joseph)

We sprinkled talcum powder onto the top of the water. We had to stay very still so the water did not move. Then Anne dropped a small piece of soap onto the top. It broke the skin on the water and made a pattern. She told us that this is water tension.

We were given a block of ice which we looked at and then put into the water. Some of us thought that the ice would float and some of us thought it would sink. Ezrah said "the ice floated, we could see the top but most of the ice was under the water".

Some of us thought about the big ship "Titanic" that sunk after it hit an iceberg.

The next experience we had was to put ice into a jar. We added a small amount of water to the jar and put the lid on. We made sure our hands and the jar was dry. We left it for a while and went back to look at it. We discovered that the jar looked blurry and when we held the jar we found that it was wet on the outside and felt cold. We talked about how the ice inside the jar had made it cold and when it met the warmer air on the outside it formed water. This is called condensation.

We poured water onto the concrete and drew a line around it. We wanted to see what would happen to the water if we left it there. Some of us thought the circle would get smaller and some of us thought the water puddle would get bigger.

When we came back to check the weather had changed and it had rained. We noticed that the whole area was now wet and although our circles were still there the puddles had joined together.