Project WET-The Incredible Journey Water Cycle Game

This fall I had the opportunity to attend a teacher workshop sponsored by Projects WET, WILD and Learning Tree held at the Beaver Brook Association located in Hollis, NH. My fellow participants and I enjoyed a fantastic day conducting and learning how to teach environmental science in the perfect outdoor setting.
Recently, I used one of the workshop activities called "The Incredible Journey," in the classroom. The fourth graders I was working with had just begun a unit on the water cycle. First, we generated a list of where we can find water. Then I introduced the "Incredible Journey" activity and sent them off on their own water journey. Pictured here is their "journey journal." At each station they placed a colored bead on their lanyard to record where they had been. After 25 minutes of journeying we stopped to discuss where their journey had taken them. In this example, the journey of this water molecule began (the right side of the picture) in a plant (green bead), which then evaporated to the atmosphere through the process of transpiration, condensed into a cloud (white), snowed onto a glacier (yellow), melted into ground water (orange), flowed into a lake (purple), which flowed into a river (dark blue), which flowed into the ocean (light blue), where it stayed for a while (now why would that be?), evaporated into the atmosphere and became a cloud again (white), rained into a lake (purple), was drunk by an animal (red), which urinated (the kids kind of thought that was gross), then seeped into the soil (black), which was absorbed by the roots of a plant (green), which was lost through transpiration to the atmosphere (white), which is where this story began but which will continue and continue and continue which of course is the whole point!!! (Sorry for the run on sentence.) As a follow up activity, the students were asked to imagine that they were a water droplet and to write a descriptive tale of their journey based on their beaded record. Needless to say, the kids had a blast with this activity.