From our cup/filter/ground material experiments, we learned a lot!  We also figured that it would be best to model why some of the materials were able to allow water to pass through them and why others weren't.

Here is some student thinking!

Many students also agreed that our experiments were necessarily totally realistic of the landscape in areas where there was supposed groundwater.  So why not build one!!!

It was just our luck too, that two students were going to Galesburg, IL during Thanksgiving, and we knew from a map of IL that Galesburg has both wells and aquifers.  These students brought back some of the soil from there so we could be as realistic as possible to see what happened with the groundwater there.  

We built a landscape adding all kinds of soil and rock, and underneath them we placed some dark colored paper to see if it got wet (we figured out that the paper turns a darker color when wet so that would give us evidence if the water went all the way through the material.  We saw lots of cool stuff...and it made us think some more (of course)!

So we noticed that the materials all let the water pass through them (with the exception of that big rock again)!  Some took longer than others, and it seems like the wetter the soil was (like the stuff from Galesburg), the easier the water was able to get "into" it.  

We also saw little pools start to develop, as well as little streams.  We also noticed that the tilt/slant/angle of the surfaces makes the water flow.  We began some models to get our thinking visible, and we'll establish consensus tomorrow!

From discussing our models, most students agreed that water gets underground because it soaks into the ground.  We figured out that it would be important to look at the maps of places that we knew had groundwater first, and when looking specifically at Rockford, Galesburg, and Champaign, IL, we saw lots of different types of ground cover.  It looked like these areas had different combinations of soil, and in our classroom we had access to sand, gravel, topsoil, and big rocks.  The big rocks could represent the streets we saw in these places.

We discussed possible investigations we could do to see if water went down through these earth materials, and we determined it would be hard to see what happened if we didn't have access to under them.  Hence, the idea of the clear cup + coffee filter secured with a rubber band was born!

Here are our investigations in action!

As the investigations were ongoing, students were recording their observations.  Check our some students' work!  There was definitely some BIG differences, and we'll be figuring out what our results tell us about how groundwater gets underground.  We'll also be modeling what this means to support our thinking!

We figured out it's in our best interest to answer our questions about groundwater, since there's a fairly decent supply of it for some communities.  Here are our initial thoughts regarding how groundwater ends up underground.  We'll be developing investigations to figure out this phenomena!

So we figured out that there's quite a bit of grounwater on the Earth, and we figured we should investigate that.  Students came up with three main ways to do so:

1.  Go dig in the ground, but that would be expensive and possibly unsafe.  Plus, we didn't really know where to look for it.

2.  Go to a city that didn't have any visible water and ask around about ground water.  But that would be hard to arrange a field trip and we'd assume that whomever we found would be able to talk about groundwater--and it's wrong of us to assume.

3.  Do some research to see if there are some groundwater maps.  This would be easy to find (hopefully) and free!  

So that's what we did.  We found the map below and zoomed in on three cities that were relatively close to Chicago, and didn't have a lot of visible water.  We were curious if they had other sources of water that could explain how they got drinking water if there wasn't any water in their communities:  Galesburg, Champaign, and Rockford.

We figured out by analyzing these maps that these cities have access to groundwater through wells and aquifers.  We don't really know much about these things...so we generated some new questions:

1.  How does groundwater even end up in the ground?
2.  How do they get groundwater out?
3.  If they are able to get it out, just how clean or dirty is it?

We'll start with the first question...check back soon!

After asking all our questions, we decided it was best to focus on the amount of freshwater on the Earth.  Just because we highlighted water on the maps, doesn't mean we really know how much that water represents, so students are using some real data and representing the fresh water vs. the salt water's quantities on Earth. If we're also worried about people's access to water, maybe they actually have enough near them and there's nothing to worry about!

​Here's our 2D thinking of this really important comparison!

And then we discussed how representing water as an area model would NOT be a good representing since water is actually 3-dimensional.  So we brought out some water and did some volume-measuring to see the difference on a scaled level.

And then we were like "WAIT!  That's really not a lot of freshwater available compared to salt water."

So we did more research to see where all the freshwater on the Earth is, since we see a lake, but some folks in the country don't see any water.  And maybe they get their water from somewhere else.  So here's what we found and modeled two-dimensionally of all the fresh water on the Earth:

That only a really, really, really small amount of freshwater is found in lakes, rivers and swamps.  The VAST majority (and almost all of it) is underground or in glaciers!!!  WHAT!?!?!?!?!  

This made us really think about the fresh water that is made available to us that we can physically see.  We know we don't live near glaciers or ice caps, but we're curious about groundwater.

• Where is groundwater?
• Is it at different depths?
• Why do some places have groundwater and others don't?
• How do they get groundwater out of the ground?
• How do they clean groundwater?

We realized that the ArcGIS maps can tell us a lot.  They showed us changes in elevation, and can also show us street names and where wastewater treatment facilities are.  We can also zoom in far enough to see if different places have fresh waterways near them.

So Mrs. Brinza gave students a whole range of cities, and students had to use the maps to figure out two things:

1.  If there was any freshwater nearby.
2.  And if so, how much of the area within a specific range was freshwater.

*They're not writing on the computer screens--but rather drawing on transparency grids on top of the screens!

And from our map analysis...we had a whole bunch of things we noticed!  These noticings generated a whole bunch of wonderings!

We figured out that there doesn't seem to be a lot of freshwater available in the US, at least around the cities we looked at.  But the cities were everywhere in the US.

If you live by the Great Lakes, like us here in Chicago, then you're pretty lucky since the Great Lakes are REALLY big compared to other places.  All this map work got us thinking though, and we generated some really good wonderings for our next investigations!

Our graphs really helped tell part of the story, too.  We can see that once we opened the lids of the jars, the weight went down.

Now that we know how water moves, we're curious about how this connects back to our Driving Question.  If all the water is refilling the lake that evaporates, what do places do that don't have a waterway like a lake near them?  

Students want to look at some maps to figure this out.  

Now that we've figured out about where our drinking water comes from, and how the lake refills, we're still curious about all this water and where it comes from.  We recognized that the lake may refill with water from precipitation and from other bodies of water that flow into it because they're at a higher elevation, but is there any other way?  How does a river even start, especially if that's the source for the lake?

We watched a series of videos to see how snow melts and becomes liquid water, but we weren't really sure that the water was still there.  So we're doing a series of investigations not only of ice melting, but of water freezing back to ice.  We're specifically looking at the water's mass, because if the mass stays the same, then we'll know the quantity of water must be the same even though it may look different.  Some students are throwing around ideas of evaporation too, and that this helps keep the water "moving" as someone said.  It's still not helping answer the questions we have about our concerns with our water making it to the ocean...

The Lake!

And now that we figured that out, we've established consensus on how the lake can refill. We agreed that areas of higher elevation help water flow into the lake (most likely through a river) and that precipitation also helps.  We even thought about snow melting and how this could also impact the lake refilling (although we don't see snow all the time here).
​

We're curious if there are other ways the lake refills since we don't really SEE the river flow into the lake, it isn't always precipitating here, and we don't really see snow on mountains near us.  We want to find out more about snow and water melting and freezing, so we're taking a side-step to figure out if a phase change keeps all the water there.  We were concerned that we're losing water as we drink it and after its treated it goes downstream eventually to the ocean.  

So after we looked at elevation data and realized that places of higher elevation lead to places of lower elevation, students began generating questions.

​And here are some they asked:

We agreed that before we figure out about a lot of things, we should figure out two ideas:

1.  Where Chicago gets its drinking water (which we'll have to research, since following the pipes back to wherever we get water would be too challenging)

2.  How wherever we get our drinking water refills, since there's a LOT of folks in Chicago using water for a lot of stuff!