Rivers (and the Water Cycle)

I didn't find too much I was dying to do with rivers...so I included the water cycle for #2 Boy's lessons this week.  We started out by writing down the different names that rivers can be called: river, stream, creek, brook, rivulet, tributary, and rill...

..... until I turned on the Water Cycle song by SteveSongs (btw, I LOVE SteveSongs).

After a bit of dancing, we melted ice into water, then made it evaporate.  I also held a lid above it so they could see how the water collected and dropped back down, after a while of that, we poured the leftover water into an ice tray and made some ice.  #2 Boy tested the water a little while later and it was starting to get hard but we could still break through the ice.  We talked about how rivers can freeze over if they get really cold.  Then we let the ice finish freezing.

 We went back to the table, but had 'The Water Cycle' playing in the background due to requests from both of the boys.  #2 Boy made a river and we found different animals that live in the rivers and where in the world they lived.  #2 Boy drew a river and added the different animals.

We did more dancing. For our snack we had water ;-)  (and a treat).

 Today I had plans to make a river out of salt dough but #2 Boy reminded me that he had already done that when we made the horse shoes and that he didn't want to do it again. I had a few other recommendations that got turned down by #2 Boy. So, the only craft we did today was to make a water cycle wheel.  The top layer has clouds, mountains, and rivers with places cut out so that the water droplets under it would show up.