Transcription
Okay, so today we're going to be exploring rivers and the land forms that go with it. And so we must be able to pronounce these terms first. So let's do our pronunciation as a whole group. First, we have lake. Good. River. Good. Source and headwaters. And because there's a comma, they are synonyms. Good. Mouth. Good. Divide. Good. Stem. Fantastic. And branch and tributary. And they are synonyms. Good. Confluence.
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Here's a two-word term: river system. And here's a, well, five-word term: stem and branch river system. Excellent. River valley. River bank. Good. Floodplains. Fantastic.
So now for this part, I often take a little time with students to talk about a related science topic, which is physical state change with water. Okay, three states of matter. Solid. Good. So now, what's this solid form of water? Ice. Now, it just so happens physical state change can be accomplished with, um, temperature. So what are you going to do to,
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change ice? Warm it. Um, what are you going to do with liquid if you want to make solid water? Freeze it. And gas? Warm water to get gas, like boil it. Okay. This is a good, what are you going to do with gas to make it into a liquid, temperature-wise? Cool it. Cool it. Yes. All right. So I think that's important to know to get started here.
Now, this is vegetable-colored water that everybody can see. Vegetable colors with food coloring made out of vegetable product. It's a synonym form. Yeah, it's organic. Um, let's pretend this, this looks like, um, just a cup of blue water to you. But for me, it's going to be a cloud. And for that, I want you to, let's blow this cloud over the ridge that way. So let's hear those noises, guys. Blowing noises. Oh, we're on this side. So why that might be blowing this way? You're just the sound effect. I'll handle the cloud. I am the wind. Okay, let's go ahead. Let's hear it more. More. Now the cloud is going up. Now hold on to that for a second. Now that the cloud has risen up higher, what has the temperature done? As you go up, it's gotten colder. Is there any sort of proof or evidence of that on the model? The snow, which is not at the bottom, but at the top of things. Yes. All right.
So now when this dropping temperature hits our cloud, what's going to happen? Right. So if I rain right on this ridge here, which way is the water going to go? And to just, let's go counter-clockwise this way. This will start with, um, Lila. Right on this. I'm going to rain on this ridge. It's gonna go down. But you gotta use your pointer to tell us about this. Show us exactly where it's gonna go down there.
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Well, I think that's, that's interesting. Now, what about if it lands on the southeast side of the ridge, like on this slope? Where is it going to go? Maybe Tristan, you're kind of just down. So some goes here, some goes here. And the stuff that goes here, you eventually, you say, is going to go all the way out. All right, let's see if you're right. Both ways. Not enough. Well, no, but I mean, did it go down this slope? Did it go down this slope? And where did it divide on the ridge? So a place where water separates and goes in opposite directions is called, ah. So let. Now I have a special pencil here called watercolor pencil. And, um, you know, it's watercolor because when you, you buy this kind of pencil, there's a tiny little paintbrush insignia on it. And it means that you know, when you have that watercolor set that you have when you're little, and have those little chiclets of color, the lead of this pencil is those little chiclets of color. And it combines with water. And here's kind of a, the path that that water might have taken. And this side, on the southeast side, neither Tristan nor Lila nor Ruthie can see. You can see a little bit, but it's on the other side of the divide. It's, uh, it's separating. And of course, that divide is along the ridge.
All right, what have we got here? By the way, like, good. That didn't take long. What if we keep on raining? Will we eventually fulfill the prediction of Lila? Very satisfying, right? See that little white boat? Let's, let's get it to go. Yeah, I also think we kind of need. It's just going into plastic. Let's, oh, let's get it to go. Not the whole thing, but just enough to cover the plastic. Right now, so we have a little ocean. Okay, I'm going to try that again with. Let's see if the boat will come. Come on, little fella. You saw me look at it. Okay, here we go. Let's see if we can. Doesn't seem to want to go yet.
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Now, what makes the boat go down? Gravity. I like. Oh, these are both good answers. Which comes first, the gravity or the current? Gravity makes. Okay, there's cause and effect. Gravity makes the current. And what about the land? Which is higher, the lake or here? The lake is higher. So, so the river runs from low to high or high to low? Because of gravity. Gravity. And I might just say parenthetically, every student that I ever taught that I saw, you know, and they couldn't tell looking at a flat map whether or not a river flowed from the ocean in or from in out to the ocean, they had no way of knowing that. They never had a terrain model. So it just didn't make. I mean, someone could tell them it flows this way or it always flows out to the ocean, but that's something they may hear and forget. Um, back to this pencil. By the way, this down here is at an entrance or an exit for the water. Exit. And what part of the river is that? Mouth. And then the other side of it, can you guess from the list what the name of the beginning is called? Like up here? Source or headwaters. Yes. Now, these little headwaters kind of got washed away. So I'm putting them back in. These rivers, and these will repeatedly get washed away, and we'll just put them back in. Um,
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by the way, this river was flowing from. See, I put this right in the center here. From what to what? SE and it's going toward NW, if you can't read it. So what is it going on? From southeast to northwest. Okay. So where are we going to rain next, guys? On that ridge. Yes. So where will the water go, Ruthie? On that, from the rain on the ridge, down that slope, down the other slope. And where, where will it divide? Um, no, no. Show us again. Thinking about here. And where's the actual divide happen? What, what, what part is that? Yes. Okay. So right, first of all, this goes through the canyon. Down. And when it joins, in Latin, uh, "con" means together, and "fluo" means flow. Yes. So speak, guys, because they can't. Yes, confluence is right there. What would you call a confluence then? I mean, how would you describe it in your own words? It's like the joining of two waters. Two sources to be one. Uh, not sources, rivers. Yeah, because this source is way up here, and this is a source, and this is a source. It's just the beginning point. But where the actual river joins, not like two, like things, like, like two waters. Better than water is two rivers. You got the joining part, which is the hard part. Okay, two waters. Would you like two Cokes? No, I'd like two waters. It works. I would like. All right, by the way, over here, look. Okay, so we have. By the way, does this source eventually go out the mouth? Yes. Show us which mouth it goes out. So this source goes out that mouth. This, these sources go out which mouth? Same one. And this is where the two rivers, uh, it's their confluence. They converge. Very nice. Rather than conflue, which would sound funny. Where should we rain next? Tristan, you want to pick a place? That's right here on the ridge. And which way will the water go there? And where's the divide? In between. Good. Let's see if you're right there. And here, maybe a little here. Now you can just draw some other stuff on there. Let's see. Do we have a more confluence? Where's the confluence? There's one. Good.
Now I think it's time to learn this one. This is like the stem. If this was a plant, and then what are these things? Branches. So, so far, we have both branches have confluences on, uh, and they both go out this. How about this river over here on the other side of the divide? Does it go out this mouth? No. No. No. Close. Out its own mouth. How about this one? This one? Yeah. No confluence with the stem. Doesn't go out that mouth. All right, who, Richie, do you want to choose where it goes now? Oh, Lyla, would you look here? Maybe or here? Uh, the first one or the second one? Which do you want? Let me just point out one thing down here. Like here's the prevailing wind. It comes over these very high ridges. By the time it gets about here, it's not raining anymore. It's all wrung out. They call it a rain shadow. This could be desert, and this could be having like terrible rain. So I would say rain anywhere in this area, maybe here, somewhere high. We'll take this ridge or this mountain right there. Sure. Okay. Now, where do you think if I, how about if I rain right on these snowy peaks? Which way is the water gonna go? Some of it will go there, down into the lake, down here to join that branch. Okay. And where else?
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Yeah, maybe even there. Hmm. Let's see. Two that you mentioned. If I go a little more this way, I'll get into that valley. And this way. Or let's sketch it all in. By the way, it, it went four, four different directions. It seems right here. Um, it went down into the lake, and it also went off here. And all that water, whether it went down into the lake, into the valley, through the gorge, on this slope, or on this slope, what mouth did it go out? Here's the stem. And let's see. Do we have any new branches? Let's point to some. There's a new one. Um, yeah, these are branches. And not only that, look at this little guy here. It's a branch off of a branch. Crazy. Yeah, that could, that can happen. And does happen a lot, actually. I see that up here in the valley. I see two branches of a branch off this stem leading to the mouth. Um, maybe we could speed this up a little bit. I'm going to choose this mountain range to rain on. Now, what do you think is going to happen if I rain right on the, right on the ridge? Probably gonna go down. Down the slopes. Down the slopes. And also down the other side slopes. On the other side, too. And when these go down the slopes, what happens to them? Where do they probably create more confluences with the? What about on the other side? Well, it's interesting. These plains, if we didn't have any of these canyons, you'd be one smooth plane. And the story of this plane is that it's made of soft volcanic ash. This once erupted tremendous. At because the wind blows this way, the ash was deposited down there. And what we thought of as the central valley, eventually, when weather started to carve the canyons with rivers, they carved it into the plane. So it's, it looks as though it's inscribed into a plane. Look at all these branches here coming from, coming from this. What? No. What's this? It's a mountain range. What else? It's a ridge. And also, because the water goes either way, it's a. Yes. All these things overlap, right? It's, you have to know a lot of synonyms. Geography. Wow, that's a lot of stuff there. I wonder how many branches we have by now. Let's see if we can do a count. Just so far. Now, we could count sources, or we could count branches. Let's count the sources first. Those would be the branch tips. Everybody. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Let's see where the next one is. Hey, now. Okay, what are we up to? Thirteen. Now, of those 20 sources, where does the water go out? Mouth. There. Now, a little, little anecdote. My daughter Ruthie brought home the word system one time when she was little. You know, I don't remember this, but as, as you see, it turns into a bad dad's story, so you'll get it. So I was kind of saying, you don't even know what system means. And she said, yes, I do. I said, yeah, what's it mean? He said, well, it's got a lot of parts and they all work together. And I was like, oh. And as I thought about it, I didn't really think that I knew what system meant before she clarified it. One of those words. Well, actually, I'm kind of like belittling myself just telling this story. But what we have here is a river system. It's got lots of parts and they also called a stem and branch river system. As in, char. Now, here's the stem. Right. Uh, the branches. We counted only sources, but for every source, there is a branch. It has a mouth. So which of these is plural and which of these is singular? You've got stem, branch, mouth, and source. And there's synonyms. In a stem and branch river system, how many mouths are there? One. How many stems are there? Actually, one. Although there, there are exceptions. Just like you've, some ever seen a tree that has two major trunks? It looks like a big V shape and all the brains. There are river systems that are structured that way with two stems. Okay. So one mouth, one stem. How many branches? Well, plural, many. How many sources? Yes, many. I'm just like trying to get a general definition. Many sources, many branches, one stem, one mouth. Um, this might be an appropriate time because it takes a long time to actually pour for every s, every single one of the branches. So I'm going to just move and exchange. Just fill up the lake. And these are by magic marker. These will not wash away. Um, I'll just lean this one over here for now. Shall we find out how many branches this actually has? This, this mouth. A one stem. And let's go around this way. Branches. Now, are we counting these two as separate branches, or how should we count them? They're separate. All right. So we'll count one, two. This is just three, four, five, six. Now, in here, there's one. Seven. Nine. What's wrong with counting over here? It's not leading into the mouth. It's not part of the stem. It's not part of the river system at all. I just did that to fool you. I mess with you. I got you. Okay, but I bet I won't get you again. Okay, so what were we up to? Eleven. Now, let's count the lake as one. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. I know we did that already. Twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six. Now we're at twenty-seven. Twenty, twenty-nine. I told you I wouldn't get you twice. Thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, three, four, three, five, six. Forty. What did we just count? How many sources must we have then? Probably 40 sources. How many stems? How many mouths? Why not? All right.
Now, can someone tell me how all these parts work together? Like, and this is like, like a bunch of sentences. You have to use stem, branch, source, and mouth, or the plural forms of those. And you can use your, you can talk with your hands, but you gotta come out with an explanation. A stem and branch river system. Give it a go. I mean, okay. Um, in a stem branch, in a stem and branch river system, multiple sources lead into one stem through multiple branches, and the one stem leads into one mouth. Very nice. How about another version? It's really good. Ruthie, you want to give it a shot? Sure. I don't know if it's gonna be much different. That's all right. But you know, when you do this with students, you, it's amazing. Like, you can picture elementary school, they all want to have a, not all, a lot of them want to have a chance. And each one will bring a little variety to it. I, I think not only is the variety good because some of them paint a different kind of picture, but even the sense that there's not one answer and that you don't memorize an answer that you read in a book, you look at it and you describe in your own words. These are, there's a training, a habit of mind which you guys all have because you've been to progressive schools. You get that. But, um, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty important kind of idea for for kids. So give us your version, Ruthie. Okay. A stem and branch river system is made up of, in this case, one stem and multiple branches. But as you said earlier, it could have multiple stems. Um, and the sources feed into the branches, which feed into the stem, and they converge there, and then they go out that one stem to the one mouth and into the ocean. Nice. And I like the way you, you used your word converge. That worked well. Give it a shot, Lyla. The stem and branch river system is made up of however many branches and however many sources. And every source connects to a branch, and then the branches all connect to the stem, and the stem brings all of the sources together to one mouth. Great. This is great. And you could have used your word confluences in there where you had connect. Yeah, right. Connections. Confluences. These are great. Um, did we leave anything off here? I'm sure we did. Oh, just something. The Latin origin of this synonym, tributary. Trib meant give. So if I pay a tribute to you, I give you applause and admiration. Or if I contribute to your charity, I give to your children. And therefore, we have a word like tributary. Also, tributary nations in the ancient world were conquered, and they had to pay a certain amount of tribute to, like, King Minos on Crete. They were tributary nations of Crete. But, and, and kids can use branch or tributary as, as they like. Students. River valley. This is such an easy idea. This branch goes through this valley up here. So this is what kind of valley? This huge valley has a big river system in it. It's what kind of valley? Yeah. So this is not, this is not rocket science. Then we have riverbank. All along. Then we have floodplain. You know what a flood is? You know what a plane is? Can anybody find some floodplain on this model? This could be fun. If it gets flooded, they tend to be on flat areas where the river is not so deep. As this, this river will never flood up this high unless, you know, this gives me an idea. Someday I'm going to put some clay in the bottom of there to make it a little, uh, shallower to demonstrate floodplains. But all along here and along here would be major floodplains. And, and, and in countries where they have a monsoon, like this big rainy season, it'll be the same time every year that the river floods over the banks on either side. We had just a little time left before dismissal, and students were pleading with me to pour water on the model. I agreed to pour some water, which pooled in a high valley, causing a lake. Listen to the students' reaction as the lake overflows and a river forms. Reading about rivers in a textbook just can't produce such excitement. I had to leave you with a cliffhanger. Well, I'll just do the last part, and then we're going to dismiss.
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Oh my god, look at that! Oh my god! In the next section, we continue our river work, predicting, pouring, and drawing in the ways that rivers and river branches flow through the valleys, down the slopes, to the river's stem, and eventually out the mouth. I try to let students discover basic principles of rivers for themselves through prediction and observation. We have another part of the river.
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They say where it begins. This is the source. And its synonym is what on the chart? Headwaters. Because it's the beginning, it's up higher. Right now, I'm just gonna like write in with my special pencil here. Where does this water, if it starts up here, I want someone to show me where it goes out into the ocean. And I guess I'll start around. Starting with you. You couldn't pass if you wanted to take your turn either way. The question is, where does the river meet the ocean? Where does it let out into the ocean? Watch it, and you'll see. Okay, point to where the exact spot where it enters the ocean. There you go. That's called the mouth of the river. Now, look, with this mouth, is this water coming in or water going out? Um, all right. So we have that. We have source, overflow, river, and then mouth, and then ocean. It makes you want to look more. Dark. The students do not take notes. The learning happens differently. I refer students to the chart of terms often. I notice the students often repeat words I've said, like exiting, perhaps to form the word for themselves, to make it theirs. There is a lot of interaction between teachers, students, and the model as we predict, pour, and draw in the entire river system. Can the river do this? If we pour on this slope, can the river go up and over the ridge? And then why? What's the problem there? It's too steep. And then we'll just, if it goes like this way and then go back up, it'll just fall back down because it can't go up. Could it go up a gentle slope? Can it go up at all? So it can't go up a steep slope or a gentle slope. It just won't do it. It's only gonna go. And what, what, what says no, no, you can't climb up the gentle slope? What force? Gravity. Gravity is just says no, you can't do it. Gravity is a stern master. That's sad. Is stubborn. And rivers are stubborn. The first rule of the river. Let's do this. Now, we've had predictions about where the water's going to go. Let's actually see it. It's dividing. Yes, it's dividing on the.
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On this side, it's really interesting. These little rivers here are so simple. They have one source and they go down to the ocean. And where they meet the ocean, it's the mouth. One source, river, and one mouth. And each mouth is different on this side. On the other side, it's a different story. All right, now I have to do these. Now, someone told me about that one. We have. Well, let's see if I can go straight down. Okay. This one meets the stem. This one's meeting the same branch to the stem. Oh my goodness, they all seem to be meeting this giant branch, right? This one. It's like a branch of water. All the water comes there somehow. Yeah, it's a branch that has branches. Yes. Yeah. And actually, some people would say it's like a giant stem because it has so many branches. Or the different tiny branches are like twigs. Yeah. Well, actually, we have the word for the for the twigs. The last thing. Three synonyms at the end. Brooks, creeks, and streams. Yeah, those will be the little branches off of another branch. I am seeing a few more places. There's one. And then there's a little. That's like a little path. Is it also a divide? Yes. Yeah, it's going in two different directions. Um, oh, I found some other ones. Look here. See this one? It's gonna divide in two ways. Oh, I see it right. One way is here, and the other way goes right down to the lake. Now, these little guys that go to the lake, they feed the lake, and they call them feeder streams. Yeah, feeder streams. We had some feeder streams over here before when we, the first time we poured. Now, what about if I rain in this, on this pass right here? So all of this is one big brother. Yeah. Look at this, guys. It's drinking the water. Did it divide there? Yeah. Yeah. So one side divided down into the lake, and the other went down to the main. That big branch. We should call it big branch. Big branch team's gonna get a river. Where'd all these canyons? Weren't all these rivers canyons before? Yeah, remember they all connected to the main canyon. Now they're all rivers connected to the main river. Is number eight? Students' understanding of river systems will always be greater than their ability to express this understanding in words. With this in mind, I ask students to volunteer to explain how a stem and branch river system works. I encourage them to use all four terms in their explanation: sources, branches, stem, and mouth. Each explanation is a little different. Students enjoy pointing to the model as they explain in words. And what was the last part after you went down the stem to the ocean? Good. All right. Hit this. Yeah. Over here in a way. Very good. And into the ocean. Good. I like the idea of pointing and talking. That kind of works well. Um, a river system is where there's, you guys, where there's many sources all around the mountain range. And then they all connect to a stem, which leads out to a mouth, which goes, in this case, to the ocean. Good.