Water goes up, water comes down — explore evaporation, condensation, and precipitation in nature's endless loop. A full 10-question lesson, exactly what your child would see.
Tip: This lesson works best as a read-aloud. Sit together, read each section out loud, and pause to discuss before answering questions.
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The water you drank this morning might have been rain last week, part of a river last month, and sitting in the ocean last year. It might have been dinosaur sweat 100 million years ago. Earth doesn’t make new water — it recycles the same water over and over in a never-ending loop called the water cycle.
Earth has the same amount of water today as it had 4 billion years ago. Not one drop has been added. Not one drop has been lost. The water just moves — from oceans to air to clouds to rain to rivers to oceans again. Around and around, endlessly.
About 97% of Earth’s water is salty ocean water — you can’t drink it. About 2% is frozen in glaciers and ice caps. That leaves only about 1% as fresh liquid water in lakes, rivers, and underground. That tiny 1% is what every land animal, every plant, and every human depends on.
The water cycle is the process that moves water between these locations. It has four main stages: evaporation (water becomes gas), condensation (gas becomes tiny droplets), precipitation (droplets fall as rain or snow), and collection (water gathers in rivers, lakes, and oceans).
In your States of Matter lesson, you learned that water exists as a solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (water vapor/steam). The water cycle is those state changes happening on a planetary scale. Evaporation = liquid to gas. Condensation = gas to liquid. Freezing = liquid to solid. The same phase changes you learned about in the kitchen are driving weather systems across the entire planet.