Lesson 5- Learning about ground water

Questions

1. Where did all the water that you poured into your cup go?
2. How does this model simulate what really happens to groundwater in the world? (How does water get underground? Where is water stored underground?)
3. Based on this experiment, what can happen to a drop of water after it falls on the ground?
4. Do you think humans use groundwater? If so, what do we use groundwater for?
5. How do humans get groundwater to the surface?  Is this easy to do?
6. Do you think groundwater can move anywhere else? Where? How does it move?
7. How have your ideas about what happens to a drop of water changed since you started learning more about groundwater?

Answers

1. The water from the cup went into the center of middle of the cup. Some of the water made it to the bottom and the rest of the water didn't and stayed close to the top.
2. This model simulates what happens to real ground water because real ground water does exactly what happened in our experiment. It is the same because the sand acts as the topsoil and the coffee filter is the clay and the rocks are the, well, the rocks!
3. Based on this experiment, when a drop of water falls onto the ground it either soaks into the ground orb stays at the top. It would stay at the top when there is concrete or some hard rock at the surface, and it would soak into the ground if there was sand or some other materiel that has tiny spaces.
4. We do use ground water. We use ground water when we are getting water from the ground, like when people in the olden days made a well or a pump to pump out clean water that web can drink.
5. There are different ways to get ground water to the surface, and that means that one is hard and cheap, and the other is easy and expensive. The easy way to get water to the surface is to use a pump, which works automatically. The hard way to get water from the ground up to the surface is to use and build a well which you have to use strength to pull the bucket of water up. 
6. Yes. I think that is can move other places besides topsoil. It can move through gravel, sand and other materiel that have spaces to get through, but it can't move through bedrock because bedrock is solid and flat, while gravel is hard but it has spaces to let the water trickle or percolate through.
7. Some of my ideas that have changed have been that I didn't think before that water can travel through clay, but in this lesson I learned that it is hard to, but it can with enough water and enough time. I really learned a lot this lesson, and I hope to learn lots and lots more in the future.