Rivers

Practice writing the names of significant rivers that are near your location or that have historical value.

Explain in writing how sediment forms to redirect the flow of a river as in the case of a meander.

Tell the story of a river's journey from headwater to mouth. Include details that describe common parts of a river, such as a waterfall, an alluvial fan, banks, oxbow lake, etc.

Using a map of Idaho, order the lengths of the major rivers from smallest to largest. Compare them to the river nearest your location.

Measure the length of one of the pieces of a standard piece of chalkboard chalk broken into 2–3 pieces. Place one broken piece into a small lidded container such as an empty pill bottle or film canister. Fill container to cover chalk with water, place the lid on and shake. Shake the container for several minutes. Pour the contents out and soak up most of the water with a paper towel. This may take a few minutes. Measure the size of the chalk again. Observe the changes in the chalk. Discuss how this is related to erosion. What can you determine about the small particles?

Copy a map of Idaho (or some other location) on to graph paper labeled with coordinates. Make sure to include the location's rivers. Play a game of “Battleship” by having students identify the river located at specific coordinates on that map. Have students color in the ones they are able to identify. An opposing player gets to color in the river if it was identified incorrectly.

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need.

Water is found in the ocean, rivers, lakes, and ponds. Water exists as solid ice and in liquid form.

Maps show where things are located. One can map the shapes and kinds of land and water in any area.

Wind and water can change the shape of the land.

Because there is always more than one possible solution to a problem, it is useful to compare and test designs.

Examples of solutions could include different designs of dikes and windbreaks to hold back wind and water, and different designs for using shrubs, grass, and trees to hold back the land.

Some events happen very quickly; others occur very slowly, over a time period much longer than one can observe.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water.

The emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

A variety of natural hazards result from natural processes. Humans cannot eliminate natural hazards but can take steps to reduce their impacts.

Examples of design solutions to weather-related hazards could include barriers to prevent flooding, wind-resistant roofs, and lightning rods.

Energy and fuels that humans use are derived from natural sources affect the environment in multiple ways.

Examples of renewable energy resources could include wind energy, water behind dams, and sunlight; non-renewable energy resources are fossil fuels and atomic energy. Examples of environmental effects could include biological effects from moving parts, erosion, change of habitat, and pollution.

Rainfall helps to shape the land and affects the types of living things found in a region. Water, ice, wind, living organisms, and gravity break rocks, soils, and sediments into smaller particles and move them around.

Examples of variables to test could include angle of slope in the downhill movement of water, amount of vegetation, relative rate of deposition, cycles of freezing and thawing of water, cycles of heating and cooling, and volume of water flow.

Examples of evidence from patterns could include rock layers with marine shell fossils above rock layers with plant fossils and no shells, indicating a change from land to water over time; and a canyon with different rock layers in the walls and a river in the bottom, indicating that over time a river cut through the rock.

When the environment changes, some organisms survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die.

Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there.

Examples of environmental changes could include changes in water distribution.

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, stream, ocean, air and even outer space. Individuals and communities can often mitigate these effects through innovation and technology.

Nearly all of Earth's available water is in the ocean. Most freshwater is in glaciers or underground; only a tiny fraction is in streams, lakes, wetlands, and the atmosphere.

Examples of the design process include examining human interactions and designing feasible solutions that promote stewardship. Examples can include water usage (such as stream and river use, aquifer recharge, or dams and levee construction); land usage (such as urban development, agriculture, wetland benefits, stream reclamation, or fire restoration); and pollution (such as of the air, water, or land).

Resources such as fresh water are limited, and distributed unevenly around the planet as a result of past geologic processes.

Water continually cycles among land, ocean, and atmosphere via transpiration, evaporation, condensation and crystallization, and precipitation, as well as downhill flows on land.

Global movements of water and its changes in form are propelled by sunlight and gravity.

Emphasis is on the ways water changes its state as it moves through the multiple pathways of the hydrologic cycle.

Water's movements-both on the land and underground cause weathering and erosion, which change the land's surface features and create underground formations.

Examples of geoscience processes include surface weathering and deposition by the movements of water, ice, and wind.