What is a Watershed? Hands-on Activity

This hands-on activity with digital lab sheet option will teach students about the importance of watersheds. Students will learn what one is, create the watershed using newspaper, and be able to describe how it is important to humans. Students will also manipulate and explain how pollutants can affect our drinking water.

This lesson is aligned with NGSS 5-ESS2-1 : Develop a model using an example to describe ways the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and/or atmosphere interact.

Students will:

• Follow instructions to create their own watershed using simple materials such as newspaper, paper towels, and plastic wrap created on a tray.
• Follow directions to mimic how rain reacts in a watershed.

This lesson includes:

• Teacher information sheet
• Student lab sheets and comprehension questions
  • Printable
  • Digital Google Slide
• Answer key

Please note: A digital Google Slide is included so that students can digitally answer the questions, however, they will still need to complete the hands on portion. This activity uses simple materials to create a watershed such as newspaper, paper towels, and plastic wrap. These materials would make it easy for a student to complete this activity in a remote learning setting.

Feedback from teachers who have used this activity in their classroom:

• Thanks for the resource! It is extremely difficult to find quality watershed activities that are affordable and clearly outlined.

• This was GREAT! Easy to implement and very engaging. Many thanks!

• I am very excited to use this activity with my after school students this year for our unit on watersheds and water quality. THANK YOU for updating this resource with an answer key for teachers that struggle with science :)

• I loved this activity! It was a little harder to construct the mountains out of newspaper in the beginning of the activity than I anticipated, but the students had a lot of creative ideas and it worked out great! It was a very powerful learning experience.

• This was an excellent resource for our global studies project.

• These were great worksheets to use with the making of a watershed. I loved the additional reading and layout that included hypothesis etc.

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Interested in Environmental Education? Check out my unit by clicking here

Other Activities You May Be Interested In to Support a Unit on the Environment:

• Oil Spill Lab
• Pacific Garbage Patch Powerpoint Lesson

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