Natural Stream Tables

Students will need to use prior knowledge and thinking skills to know what might get washed away to the St. Louis River when searching in the park.
Students will need to devise a plan for a stream table using the items they've found.
Students will journal about items picked and then state why they chose them and how they think each item will perform when tested.
Students will set criteria for stream table experiment.
-For Example: amount or water, degree of slope, how much water, etc.
Students will predict outcomes and record in journal.

Vocabulary:
-Slope
-Saturated
-Precipitation

This lesson will either be a cumulative project at the end of our FOSS Landforms unit or possibly a beginning exercise to introduce us to stream tables. It will be center around a fifth grade classroom and should take two to three lessons to complete. This lesson could be broken down into many smaller lessons depending on amount of time or surroundings outside your school i.e. our school is right next to a park so finding outside items that get washed into sewer drains and down hillsides should be easy to find. If a park is not readily available, you might have to have students go home and gather sticks, leaves etc. for the experiment and then possibly put those items in your stream tables inside.

This lesson will start with a question to the students. "When it rains in Cloquet, what items end up washing into the St. Louis River and what type of items do not?" After some journaling on this question students will be instructed to go outside and try and find items that they either wrote about or new items that they find. Each student will be asked to find three items that they think will and three items that they think will not wash into the river. Students will need to explain in journals why or why not they think items will wash or not wash.
After this, they will need to set up and experiment to test their ideas.

Materials:
-Water
-An inclined plane (stream table)
-Way of determining the amount of water being poured out (watering jugs for flowers with the holes in the ends)
-Timer
-Whatever they think best represents our natural ground setting

Students will need to set up a test situation and run the test multiple times to see if results stay the same and then they need to journal and record results for each running. After everyone has finished experimenting, they need to organize data into some type of graphic organizer to present to the class. Again, the lesson will probably take three days to complete.

This activity is different from what we have done in the past because we use the FOSS equipment provided and don't add anything from our outside world of nature. I want the students to think about erosion and how it affects our local surroundings.

Assessment will be from observations during student's gathering materials, to observing experiments, and finally watching student's present results to class.

The student will understand the process of scientific investigations.
5.I.b.1 - controlled experiment
5.I.b.2 - repeated experiment, similar result expected