Year 5- Water cycle

As part of Water Wise Week, the children created the water cycle in a bag to see the processes involved. Firstly, the children used  permenant markers to draw a sky in the upper half of your plastic bag.  Include clouds and the sun, as they are important elements to the water cycle. Next, the added blue food colouring to water and carefully poured the water into the plastic bag and zip it closed.  Once the water was added to the bag and sealed it up, it’s was time to hang it up on a window!  It was important to pick a window that gets a lot of sunshine for best results. Finally it was time to observe. Eventually, droplets of water started sticking to the side of the bag.  Some of these were up high (in the clouds) while other droplets will be on their way back down (like rain). Why is this happening?  It’s because the water in the bag is being heated up against the sunny window.  That water turns into a gas through the process called evaporation.  In nature, evaporated water vapour goes into the atmosphere, but in our bag, it has nowhere to go, so it ends up sticking to the sides of the bag, turning back into a liquid as condensation.  That condensed water then slides back into the pool of water below as “rain”.