Making a Watershed!

This lesson outline and PowerPoint guide you and your students through learning about watersheds by making your own! Students will make their own landscape and hypothesize where water and land are on their landscape. They can add places of human activity and predict what will happen to their watershed when it "rains"! This is a fun, short activity that can be extended to emphasize key ideas. The Enviroscape from the Great Lakes Aquarium is optional but very useful for this lesson!

Details

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Great Lakes Literacy Principles:
1. The Great Lakes, bodies of fresh water with many features, are connected to each other and to the world ocean.
2. Natural forces formed the Great Lakes; the lakes continue to shape the features of their watershed.
4. Water makes Earth habitable; fresh water sustains life on land. :
6. The Great Lakes and humans in their watersheds are inextricably interconnected.


Published by Ariel Johnson | 0ne comment

1 Comment

  • Ariel Johnson says:

    It may be best to have an example and show students how to crumple their paper in order to make a landscape. Telling them that the goal is to make a landscape may help too, otherwise they’ll just make the paper into a ball. This lesson can be tricky indoors but is fun outside. What I was hoping to do was have students spray their watersheds in the snow so they could see how the colors run off their watershed and go onto the snow…which could represent other watersheds. An extension that could also be done if you only have one spray bottle is to tape all the watersheds together and have the students spray their own to see how one watershed can effect another. This is a fun lesson but can really hit on some important issues!