Lessons and Activities Investigating Human Activities Impacting the Water Cycle
If your students understand the principles of the water cycle, they are ready to investigate environmental issues involving the relationships between and among human needs, technological innovations, and the forces of nature.
One issue is the growing human population worldwide and the increased demand for clean, fresh water that comes along with it. Some say there is enough water, it's just not potable. The infrastructure required to purify and move water to where it needs to be is extremely costly. From the perspective of a for-profit business, there is not much profit to be gained in doing so. Rather, for-profit businesses thrive on building and development, which means deforestation and increased incidence of flooding, which contributes to water pollution and exacerbates the clean water issue.
In this interdisciplinary, multiday lesson, students will use their knowledge of the importance of water to learn about the hydrosphere. A drought will be explored through graphs and a personal plan for water conservation. MSP
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In this lesson students will use their knowledge of rainfall, vegetation, and the slope angles of hillsides to make decisions, predict outcomes, and analyze the effects of certain events or practices (e.g., overgrazing, forest fires, and clear-cutting woodlands). This lesson will help students appreciate the complex relationships between physical processes and the features they help create and understand the physical processes affecting the surface of the earth. MSP full record
This activity can enrich a study of the water cycle. It prepares you to launch an investigation of the relationship between precipitation and streamflow for a local watershed. Following the step-by-step instructions in a case study, students can locate and graph one year of web-based data for these two variables. The graph provides a context for launching a discussion of the balance between surface runoff and infiltration during and after a rain event, soil porosity, soil saturation level, the influence of impervious surfaces such as concrete parking lots and roads in a basin, the impact of slope, wind and air temperature on watershed hydrology, and the influence of high or low vegetation. You should allow at least four 45-minute class sessions for the entire activity. MSP full record
In this lesson, students will take their knowledge about the hydrosphere and apply it to the issue of population growth and development. In particular, students will learn how increasing development in eastern North Carolina may have worsened the effects of flooding from Hurricane Floyd, due to lack of soil and tree absorption of runoff. In small groups, students will create their own development plans for North Carolina and explain how their plan will benefit the state’s water resources and environment. MSP full record
In this online activity, students research the ecological impacts of developing a community along a river that has been dammed for some time. Once they have completed the research (in teams), the students prepare a presentation for a town meeting. Activity pages, resource pages, evaluation criteria, and teacher pages are included. MSP full record
Though this lesson focuses heavily on engineering, you can use it as a segue to discussion of human activities as they relate to the water cycle. The Three Gorges Dam in China is a sensational example of the benefits and problems of damming major rivers, but you can probably find smaller scale, analogous projects in your own area to discuss with students. MSP full record
This Internet-based collaborative project will allow students to share information about water usage with other students from around the country and the world. Based on data collected by their household members and their classmates, students will determine the average amount of water used by one person in a day. They will compare this to the average amount of water used per person per day in other parts of the world. Students can publish reports, photos, or other work directly to the site. A teacher’s guide with information on how to implement lessons in the classroom is included. MSP full record
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Copyright
July 2007 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work
supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any
opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the National Science Foundation.
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