An Animated Tour of the Water Cycle and Water Treatment

The US Environmental Protection Agency offers some nice resources for teaching about the water cycle and water treatment. Thirstin's Water Cycle takes students on an animated and narrated tour of the water cycle from water, to vapor, to clouds, to rain. Thirstin's Tour of a Water Treatment Plant takes students on a narrated tour through a typical water treatment facility found in the United States.

Applications for Education
Both of Thirstin's narrated tours are designed as supplementary materials to the elementary school lesson plans offered in the teacher's resources section of EPA.gov.

Animated Tours of the Water Cycle and Water Treatment Plants

This afternoon I spent a little time on the EPA website exploring the resources that it offers to teachers and students. Two of the EPA's educational offerings that jumped out at me are animated tours of the water cycle and a water treatment plant.

Thirstin's Water Cycle takes students on an animated and narrated tour of the water cycle from water, to vapor, to clouds, to rain. Thirstin's Tour of a Water Treatment Plant takes students on a narrated tour through a typical water treatment facility found in the United States.

Applications for Education
Both of Thirstin's narrated tours are designed as supplementary materials to the elementary school lesson plans offered in the teacher's resources section of EPA.gov.

Environmental Science and Math Lessons

In the last couple of days I've discovered two websites designed to help people calculate motor vehicle fuel economy and fuel saving strategies. I also explored the education pages of the Environmental Protection Agency's website. Using these three resources teachers can build a number of environmental science and some math lessons.

Fuelly, is a website where people register their vehicles and track fuel economy. Visitors to Fuelly can also look at other peoples' vehicle's fuel economy.

Walk Score is new website that ranks the "walkability" of 40 cities in the United States. By entering an address into the "walkability" calculator users can determine how easy or difficult it is to travel through a city without using a personal vehicle.

The Environmental Protection Agency has some great pages for teachers to use with students in all grade levels. The EPA website also has pages dedicated to independent learning activities for students. The pages for pre-K through 4th grade are especially good.

Applications for Education
Using Fuelly and Walk Score together students can evaluate the savings created by walking around down instead of driving. To make the activity more accurate teachers can have their students add in the average costs of parking fees in a city.

To help teachers keep environmental lessons relevant to where their students live, the EPA provides a search-by-zip code option which provides visitors with environmental news and data relevant to your zip code.