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Listed under:  Science  >  Life  >  Ecosystems  >  Biogeochemical cycles  >  Water cycle
Online

Catchment management: the drain is just for rain

Stormwater originated as rain and flows into creeks, rivers and other water bodies. Any rubbish or chemical pollution collected during this journey can end up polluting the waterways. This activity looks the impacts of stormwater and rubbish in our waterways. Outcomes of this learning activity are for students to: understand ...

Online

Catchment management: water sustainability

Water is an important resource, and is required by all living species to survive. Water is also important for many industries and businesses. This activity investigates the different land uses over time across your local catchment. OUTCOMES are for children to: understand the natural and urban water cycle; learn about the ...

Online

Catchment management: what’s in a drop?

Water is a precious resource, yet water is also wasted every day. This activity investigates water consumption and how you can reduce the amount of water wasted. OUTCOMES of this learning activity are for students to: understand the urban water cycle; learn different ways to reduce water usage; discover how much water is ...

Downloadable

Why is water sticky?

In this lesson sequence, students use a range of hands-on activities to explore what water is and how it behaves as it changes from ice to liquid water to water vapour. They explore the structure of water molecules and how these molecules behave when water is heated and cooled to help them to understand how the water cycle works.

Downloadable

How my water travels

In this lesson sequence, students explore what happens as water soaks into or runs over the ground. They gain an understanding of a catchment from a sandpit model that show how water moves across the landscape. Students then trace the journey that their water takes every day, from catchment or aquifer to tap.

Downloadable

How much rain?

In this lesson sequence, students participate in a puzzle hunt in the school grounds to find letter clues that lead to the location of a special gift (a rain gauge) related to water. Students then make rain gauges and record rainfall in the school grounds with both the hand-made and commercial rain gauges.

Downloadable

Solar still activity

In this activity students create a solar still and use a predict-observe-explain strategy to investigate how coloured salty water transforms into clear unsalted water. This activity is useful for exploring changes of state (evaporation and condensation) and water cycles.

Downloadable

Are we living sustainably?

This unit of eight lessons poses the question ‘Are we living sustainably?’ Students use prompts to draw on their prior knowledge to explain what they already know about sustainability. They then investigate why water is precious, explore how water is used around their school and at home. Students then research ways that ...

Downloadable

Using Whizzy's storybooks

These lessons use a story-telling content and are designed to promote student understanding of why water is vital to living things, sources and uses of water, how water changes in the water cycle and why and how to use water wisely.

Downloadable

Where does rain go?

In this activity, students explore what happens to rain falling on different surfaces.

Downloadable

Water is special

In this lesson sequence, students explore what water is and how it behaves as it changes from ice to liquid water to water vapour. The purpose of this lesson sequence is to give students a mental picture of water molecules. Learning about how these molecules behave when water is heated and cooled can help them to understand ...

Downloadable

How does water change?

In this lesson, students explore the properties of water using their senses. This activity is useful as a quick introduction to the topic

Downloadable

How is water used?

In this lesson, students investigate the variety of ways water is used by plants and humans in four workstation activities.

Online

The water cycle in the Murray-Darling Basin

This lesson sequence introduces students to the water cycle or hydrological cycle in the context of the Murray-Darling Basin. It examines how the components of the water cycle are connected and contains four hands-on science investigations. Each lesson includes a teacher PowerPoint presentation, separate teacher notes and ...

Online

Mapping our waterway

This is a 29-page PDF unit of work for year 7 that comprises a two-part teaching and learning sequence on waterways. 'Assessing the health of the waterway' involves students collecting data to assess the water quality of a local waterway, while 'Creating a map of the waterway' involves them using Google maps to display ...

Image

Groundwater

This is an online resource about Australia's groundwater that provides important information, facts and images about groundwater. It contains seven major sections: Latest news about Australia's groundwater; Basics - groundwater; Our capabilities - groundwater; Groundwater in Australia; Understanding groundwater resources; ...

Online

Blue marble matches - activity

This is a resource for educators outlining practical activities that explore geological processes on Earth and how to identify geological features in images. It demonstrates how scientists use the Earth to gain a better understanding of other planetary bodies in the solar system through examining images of their geological ...

Online

Recent evapotranspiration

This resource is a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) web page with a map of Australia showing daily reference evapotranspiration and also tables of daily transpiration for each Australian state and the Northern Territory. Monthly data is available via the location links in the tables for each state.

Online

Interactive weather and wave forecast maps

This is a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) web page providing weather and wave forecasts for up to seven days displayed as a computer-generated map. The wide range of options available via drop-down menus includes the type of weather or wave information to be displayed, level (altitude), area (region), time zone and period (duration). ...

Video

Cloud seeding

This nine and a half minute video segment from Catalyst describes how researchers from Monash University have hard evidence that cloud seeding can produce good amounts of extra rainfall. Data collected over a long period of time has give hope to scientists and environmentalists who are trying to reduce the impacts of droughts ...