3rd Grade Animated Water Cycle
Third graders at Varina Elementary have been learning about the water cycle (SOL3.9), so today students in Ms. Cathcart’s class created animated water cycles using ABCYa!Animate. Before we got started, we reviewed the parts of the cycle and what was happening in each part: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff. On the first frame of our animation we painted a scene with water and land and typed the title. We duplicated the scene with the copycat button and added some evaporation. I pointed out that evaporation is actually invisible, but we had to show it somehow. On subsequent frames we continued adding parts to the cycle until we finished with water runoff from the land back into the sea. We clicked the Looping button so our animation would play repeatedly, then exported it as a .GIF file using the orange Export button. To share our animations, we uploaded them to a Padlet that you can see here.