Water Quality Lesson 3 : Do You Know YOUR Watershed?
1. Working in small groups, students will make a watershed model in a disposable aluminum pan by crumpling newspaper and placing it in the pan. Cover the newspaper with foil (shiny side up). Students should spray water onto the watershed model and watch where it goes, then label the parts of the river and watershed with the overhead transparency labels provided: watershed, sub-watershed, headwaters, mouth, drainage divide, streambank, floodplain, meander, upstream, downstream, direction of flow, main channel, and tributary. (SAVE these watershed models for Lesson 4.)
2. In their science journals, ask students to describe how the land area of a watershed and the local weather affect the amount of water in a stream.