Water Droplet Travel Guide (Where does the Rain go?)

Student Directions

The Challenge: In teams organized with the help of your teacher, produce a travel guide for a drop of water entering our local watershed from the atmosphere. You may choose any location in our watershed as the point of impact for the water droplet.

As you prepare your travel guide, please consider the following:
  • Your travel guide should be colorful, neat, and easy to read and understand. Proper English grammar and spelling are expected. Your guide should be no larger than two pieces of 8 1/2 x 11 pieces of paper.
  • Your travel guide should be creative and catchy. Write it as if you want every droplet of water to want to come to our area. Let the reader know of at least two possibilities of where the droplet might go in the watershed as it makes its way back into the atmosphere.
  • Provide a map and pictures so that a droplet could find its way through our watershed. Include some narration to explain or describe the different paths the droplet might follow and the implications.
  • Be sure to use the terms “precipitation”, “evaporation”, “condensation”, “run off”, “absorption”, and “soaking in” accurately as they describe the droplet’s experience in your watershed.
  • Identify major features such as mountains, fields, parking lots, and rivers that the water may be traveling on or in. Identify what the water will be doing as it travels and how those features in the
  • landscape can influence how the water travels. Will one pathway allow it to travel quickly? More slowly? Will it pick up things along the way?
  • Include graphics and illustrations wherever they may help support your message. You must include at least one graphic that accurately shows the water cycle as it applies to your droplet.
To assist in your planning and completion of this project, you and your group should read the challenge and the product quality checklist, and then brainstorm a list of tasks necessary to complete. You will be asked to divide up the tasks, assign duties and fill out a planning schedule to accomplish your project in the time allotted. Show this planning sheet to your teacher as soon as you can in the process.

Each team member is expected to keep a work journal with a record of accomplishments and reflections for each day.

You will have five class days to complete this challenge.


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