Month: October 2025

We have had several meetings with Zach and this ultimately helped give us a view on how we will progress our project. This also gave us an idea on what the main goal was and what to dig deeper into. Our meetings with Zach consisted of our future plans for our water fair.

We concluded that each water fair lesson will be 15 minutes long totaling 45 minutes to an hour total. Then we also had to put the actual time for the students to rotate stations so therefore we need to account 12 minutes for rotation. We will have 3-4 students per station; our group spent a lot of time focussing on what middle schoolers enjoy, but twist them to grasp more elementary topics. Our audience is 3rd-5th graders with some older grades mixed in.

We decided to research topics regarding a retention pond, pollution, water run off, flooding issues in specific locations, duckweed, plumbing issues, and to keep everything community focused. Our ultimate goal has been getting students invested in their community, and making them feel involved regarding water conservation.

Over the past few weeks, I have compiled several possible lesson plans as options for the water fair at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition Innovation Center. I wanted to find credible lesson plans and resources that I can use to compare standard ground with rain garden ground, focusing on infiltration rates, runoff, and environmental impacts. While compiling these lessons, I created an annotated bibliography that includes the lesson citation and a description of the lesson.

Some children learn best by listening to their teacher, while others require hands-on experience, and still others benefit from a visual example provided by an instructor. For the last type, some plans include videos of instructors demonstrating rainwater runoff. This is why I am open to finding a lesson that is easy to understand, comprehensive, interactive, and engaging.

I have narrowed down my lesson plans to the one that I will be conducting at the water fair at JJK. This is to understand infiltration and run-off.

Students will be provided with 3 cups. Cup A will contain clean water. The water will be poured into Cup B. Cup B will contain soil on top and one other object at the bottom (such as leaves, tin foil, wood chips, etc). Cup B and the object will both contain a hole. The water that is poured into Cup B from Cup A will run into Cup C. The students will observe the amount of water in Cup C and the color of the water in Cup C. To prepare for the fair I will practice the lesson ahead of time.

I have narrowed down my lesson plans to the one that I will be conducting at the water fair at JJK. This is to understand infiltration and run-off.

Students will be provided with 3 cups. Cup A will contain clean water. The water will be poured into Cup B. Cup B will contain soil on top and one other object at the bottom (such as leaves, tin foil, wood chips, etc). Cup B and the object will both contain a hole. The water that is poured into Cup B from Cup A will run into Cup C. The students will observe the amount of water in Cup C and the color of the water in Cup C. 

First, we will demonstrate the experiment with Cup B, which contains only soil at the bottom and requires two scoops of soil. Then we will fill Cup A a third to halfway with water. Then, dump the water from Cup A into Cup B. Then, observe what comes out of the bottom into Cup C. The water that comes out is called run-off. This ultimately flows into Cup C. Discuss the amount and color of the water with the students. Observe the amount and color of the water. Now, you will redo the experiment, but place different objects at the bottom of your Cup B that will act as obstructions, such as tinfoil or a sponge. What do we predict will happen, and then observe the runoff?

Then we all come together and discuss our observations and results regarding which object had the most and least run-off, and which run-off was the darkest. This shows how water moves through a system and changes along the way. How different objects affect the amount of water and the quality of water in a system, and if water can’t be taken into the soil, it can go through various routes of the water cycle.