The Water Cycle is is the journey water takes as it circulates from the land to the sky and back again. The Water Cycle is made up of a few main parts: evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. Earth's water is always in movement and is always changing states, from liquid to vapor to ice and back again. The water cycle has been working for billions of years and all life on Earth depends on it continuing to work.

This game will allow you create evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and run off using the sun and a mirror. Read the directions carefully to successfully complete this game. Make sure to understand what is happening in the game to help you better understand what each of those terms mean and how they are created.

The process of water molecules escaping the surface of the Earth and entering the atmosphere is known as evaporation. Evaporation takes place as molecules of water escape from a collective body of water. This can be a puddle, a lake, a stream, or just a droplet of water. As water molecules evaporate, they take with them some of the heat from the object from which they evaporated. This heat is stored in the water molecule, and is referred to as latent heat. The result is that the object’s temperature is lowered slightly. Consider what happens to your body on a hot day. As the temperature rises, your body begins to produce sweat. As the sweat evaporates it carries with it some of the heat from your body, causing your body to cool down. The process of cooling down an object via evaporation is known as evaporative cooling. Many air conditioners are actually evaporative coolers, and work by taking advantage of this process.

Condensation is the process by which water vapor in the air is changed into liquid water. Condensation is crucial to the water cycle because it is responsible for the formation of clouds. These clouds may produce precipitation, which is the primary route for water to return to the Earth's surface within the water cycle. Condensation is the opposite of evaporation. Condensation is responsible for ground-level fog, for your glasses fogging up when you go from a cold room to the outdoors on a hot, humid day, for the water that drips off the outside of your glass of iced tea, and for the water on the inside of the windows in your home on a cold day.

Precipitation is water released from clouds in the form of rain, freezing rain, sleet, snow, or hail. It is the primary connection in the water cycle that provides for the delivery of atmospheric water to the Earth. Most precipitation falls as rain. Precipitation does not fall in the same amounts throughout the world, in a country, or even in a city.. For example, deserts average less than an inch of total precipitation per year. The agricultural Midwest, however, receives approximately 15 inches per year, while tropical rain forests can receive more than 100 inches of precipitation per year!

This interactive Water Cycle diagram allows you to click on a term and learn more about what each of them mean. If you are interested in learning more about the Water Cycle, this would be a great tool to use!

We are going to watch this YouTube video that further describes to us the main parts of the Water Cycle. By the end of this unit, you all should be pros about the components of the Water Cycle and how the Water Cycle works!