Subject
Water Cycle, Earth and Space Science.
Objectives
In this lesson students will learn about watersheds and the inter connectivity of water bodies on the planet. They will also understand a little about the salmon life cycle and the habitat of salmon in each stage.
Materials
- Watershed Packet
- Sourced from: Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association and Project WET
- Watershed Slideshow
- Wax paper
- Food Coloring (Blue and another of your choice)
- Eye droppers
Background
A watershed is an area of land that is drained by a river and its tributaries to a common outlet. This common outlet could be a lake, basin, larger river, or estuary. The boundary of this watershed is a ridgeline, because, due to gravity, water goes downhill.
Procedure
- Hand out the Watershed Packet.
- Go through the Watershed slideshow as they follow along with the first 3 pages of the Watershed packet, stop before the last slide.
- Prepare your watershed model water. You will need two colors, blue for freshwater, and another color of your choice for pollution (red stands out well).
- Instruct the students on how to create topography/ landscape with your wax paper. Crumple the paper to have one main mountain peak in the middle, or multiple mountain ranges, be creative.
- Have the students look at their model and make some predictions.
- Where will water collect (lakes, oceans, basins)?
- Where would rivers form?
- Do you see any obvious ridgelines?
- How many watersheds do you have on your piece of wax paper?
- Let the students test it out! Start with just the blue water, and let it drop as “precipitation” and see if their predictions from before were correct.
- Now discuss pollution, what is pollution and where does it come from?
- Discuss the main sources of pollution: Urban runoff, agricultural runoff, factories, oil spills, mine spills and so on
- Have the students pick one spot to have an oil spill or something of the sort and pour the pollution in that spot
- What parts of the model’s fresh water were polluted? How far did the pollution spread?
- Now let the students pollute freely to see how pollution can spread through a watershed
- Have the students do the fill in the blank page in their packet with the watershed vocab on the next page. The answers are on the last slide of the slideshow.