In June, we explored a "River" theme! Where do rivers start? Where do they go? Why do we need rivers? What's the longest river in the world?
One of our first activities was to make this simple mountain of crinkled paper. We put blue paint on top to represent the "source" of the river. Then the kids took turn spraying the paint with water. We tried to guess where the rivers would go, and little by little we watched these mini rivers grow. Some went very straight, some had sharp turns, some made ponds. But mostly it's just fun to spray things with water!
What better way to understand how rivers and waterfalls work than to make a real river and waterfall! We set up this water toy on a table, filled the "source" with water, and let the water go through the "channels" which led to a waterfall off the table and into a tub below! This was so fun we had to do it several times! We also put different objects in the river to represent sediment and see how many times we had to release the source water to push the sediment all the way to the mouth of the river.
Towards the end of the month we created our own river model. The first step was to use newspapers to make paper mache mountains and a water channel. The kids loved this because the water and glue mixture was so slimy! The next day we painted our creation. Finally, the kids used construction paper to make plants and animals to decorate our model river. Everyone worked so well together to make a great class craft!
