The Tikkun Project
Lesson
5
Drawing and Labelling Our Water Cycle
Concept
Now that we've experienced how water moves and changes, we can put real scientific names to what we already understand.
Focus Question
What are the scientific names for the ways water moves and changes state — and can we find them in what we already discovered?
Knowledge & Understanding Goals
Science & Technology, Air and Water, 3.1: Identify the three states of water and describe clues showing how heating/cooling cause state change.
Science & Technology, 3.5: Explain how water travels through living systems via infiltration, transpiration, and consumption.
Thinking & Learning Skills
Thinking Skills (Vocabulary Mapping): Attaching formal scientific terms to a concept already understood through direct experience.
Research Skills (Structured Observation): Using labelled stations to observe a scientific process.
Context
This lesson deliberately comes after the concept-building game and story (Lesson 4) students attach vocabulary (infiltration, transpiration, evaporation, condensation) to pathways and processes they've already experienced, rather than learning terms and concepts at the same time. This ordering is meant to help the vocabulary stick, by giving students a concept to scaffold the new terms onto rather than presenting concept and label simultaneously.
Lesson Outline
NAMING WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW
Remind students of the droplet game from Lesson 4: sometimes water soaked into the ground, sometimes it left through a leaf, sometimes an animal breathed it out. Introduce the real names for these pathways: infiltration (soaking into soil), transpiration (leaving a leaf), respiration (breathed out by an animal). Ask students to match each term back to their own memory of playing that station in the game.
OBSERVING CHANGES OF STATE
Set up four Thermal Transformation Stations for structured observation: Evaporation (a shallow dish of water marked with a line under a warm lamp); Melting & Freezing (ice cubes melting on a plate); Condensation (water droplets gathering on an ice-cold cup); Boiling/Steam (a safe electric kettle heating up). Students log observations using the vocabulary (melting, freezing, boiling, evaporation, condensation, temperature).
DRAWING AND LABELLING OUR DIAGRAM
Students return to their Water Cycle Diagrams — modelled by the teacher on the class version first, per the unit's established pattern — and add all of today's new elements: a vibrant Sun as the engine driving temperature change; deep roots showing infiltration; arrows showing transpiration leaving leaves; a labelled animal showing respiration.
UPGRADING OUR REASONS
Students open their Thought-books to the 5-Finger Reason Hand Tracing from Lesson 3. Using their new vocabulary, they revise or add reasons — upgrading a simple "Animals need it" into something more specific, like "It's important to protect water because pollution travels through infiltration into the groundwater where animals drink."
REVISITING OUR CONNECTION DASHBOARD, ONE MORE TIME
Return to the Dashboard a final time. Ask: now that we know the real names for these pathways — infiltration, transpiration, respiration — does that change how connected we think Toronto's water is, or does it just give us better words for what we already believed? Students justify their answer, this time using at least one specific vocabulary term as evidence ("I still think totally connected, because now I know the word for it — infiltration means water goes into the ground everywhere, not just here").
Notes for Teaching and Evaluation
Explicitly asking students to match each new term back to their own memory of the game (rather than presenting the vocabulary cold) is the whole point of the reordering — the concept was built experientially in Lesson 4, and this lesson's job is only to attach the correct label to something already understood.
Revising the exact same 5-Finger Reason Hand Tracing from Lesson 3, rather than starting fresh, is what makes a genuine before-and-after comparison possible, word for word.
Asking whether the vocabulary changes their belief or just gives them better words for an existing belief is a genuinely more sophisticated question than simply re-rating connectivity — it tests whether students can distinguish learning new facts from learning new labels for facts they already held.