This curriculum builds upon many years of educating students in the garden and scales up content across grades and lessons for instructional scaffolding. It is designed as an interactive teaching tool to be co-taught with classroom teachers and garden instructors as leads. Each lesson connects directly to standards: Next Generation Science, Common Core State, Physical Education, and Environmental and Health Education. The concise and easy to-follow lessons are a packed 45 minutes for preschool through fifth grade. Flexibility is important, so some lessons include several activities that teachers can choose from to accommodate their lesson plans. Consistency is also important, so lessons follow themes and structures found in the Curriculum Map. 360 pages.

Objective
SWBAT explain and provide evidence for how water is cycled through ecosystems.

Big Idea
How can a model help us understand the hydrologic cycle? Students revise their models, and extend what they have learned to help them construct an understanding of how water is cycled on Earth.

Join Simon, Anita and Dennis as they explore the names of clouds. And what's a Contrail?Download the Clouds Module storybook and learning activities!

In this 6th grade science class, students consider how they use water in their daily lives and learn that water is a nonrenewable resource in a closed system.

The books selected for this list complement articles in the issue of Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle that introduce the concepts of water availability and of extreme weather conditions. In nonfiction and fiction, the books for Grades K-5 emphasize that freshwater is a limited resource and explain how and why extreme weather events occur.

Students learn about energy and nutrient flow in various biosphere climates and environments. They learn about herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, food chains and food webs, seeing the interdependence between producers, consumers and decomposers. Students are introduced to the roles of the hydrologic (water), carbon, and nitrogen cycles in sustaining the worlds' ecosystems so living organisms survive. This lesson is part of a series of six lessons in which students use their growing understanding of various environments and the engineering design process, to design and create their own model biodome ecosystems.

 LESSON 1: THE SALTY STUMPER: A GROUNDWATER CASE STUDY Building upon prior knowledge of the water cycle, students explore how groundwater moves and interacts with surface water in a watershed. Using data from a case study in Ottawa County, students consider how both natural characteristics of an aquifer and human activities can affect the quantity and quality of groundwater for human use. Students build models to understand groundwater processes, construct arguments based on evidence for how and why issues of groundwater quantity and quality exist, and evaluate the benefits and constraints of various solutions to these problems. 

Students are introduced to the fabulous planet on which they live. Even though we spend our entire lives on Earth, we still do not always understand how it fits into the rest of the solar system. Students learn about the Earth's position in the solar system and what makes it unique. They learn how engineers study human interactions with the Earth and design technologies and systems to monitor, use and care for our planet's resources wisely to preserve life on Earth.

This list of children's books recommends nonfiction titles that supplement basic information found in lessons and activities of this themed issue of the online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle. The books are grouped by topic -- water, weather and climate, and atmosphere. Each book is described by its content, reading level, and possible uses in the classroom. Covers are pictured. The online magazine is produced for elementary school teachers and is structured around the essential principles of climate sciences and climate literacy.

This article describes ways to supplement a science unit on the water cycle with the book Water Dance by Thomas Locker. Ideas for art, writing, poetry, and creative movement are included.

Students learn about floods, discovering that different types of floods occur from different water sources, but primarily from heavy rainfall. While floods occur naturally and have benefits such as creating fertile farmland, students learn that with the increase in human population in flood-prone areas, floods are become increasingly problematic. Both natural and manmade factors contribute to floods. Students learn what makes floods dangerous and what engineers design to predict, control and survive floods.

Students learn about the importance of dams by watching a video that presents historical and current information on dams, as well as descriptions of global water resources and the hydrologic cycle. Students also learn about different types of dams, all designed to resist the forces on dams. (If the free, 15-minute "Water and Dams in Today's World" video cannot be obtained in time, the lesson can still be taught. See the Additional Multimedia Support section for how to obtain the DVD or VHS videotape, or a PowerPoint presentation with similar content [also attached].)