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Rice Nursery: Tracking Water into the Air

Analyze a rice-farm investigation and build a model showing how soil, water, moving air, and living plants interact.

Grade 5ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned to5-ESS2-1

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
13 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 5
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Matching, Circle the answer, Sorting, Short answer, Drawing

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students compare investigation results to identify interactions among soil, water, air, and rice plants.
Students model water moving from soil through plants into the air and directly from soil into the air.
Students distinguish evidence-supported model connections from processes the investigation did not measure.

How to use

Read the investigation and examine the graph together. Have students compare the results independently, then draw and explain a connected Earth-system model.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

5-ESS2-1

Model how land, water, air and living things interact.

Preview

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Rice Nursery: Tracking Water into the Air

Use a class investigation to model connections among land, water, air, and living things.

1. Investigate the Nursery Trays

Read the class investigation. Use its steps and results to answer the questions.

A Breeze Across the Rice Nursery

At a rice farm, young rice plants grow in a nursery before workers move them into larger fields. A visiting class noticed that the nursery soil was damp. Breezes passed over the plants. The students wondered how plants and moving air might affect water leaving the trays. They built small models of the nursery.

Their model included four Earth systems. Soil represented land, or the geosphere. Water in the soil represented the hydrosphere. The surrounding air represented the atmosphere. Rice plants represented living things, or the biosphere. Water can evaporate from damp soil into the air. Roots can take in soil water, and some of that water can later leave the leaves as invisible water vapor.

Step 1: The class prepared four matching trays. Each held the same mass and type of soil and received the same amount of water. Two trays also held five similar rice seedlings. Two had bare soil. The students wiped the outside of each tray dry.

Step 2: Students weighed each whole tray, including its soil, water, and any plants. They recorded a separate starting mass for each tray because the plants added mass. They placed one planted tray and one bare-soil tray in still air. A small fan blew across the other planted tray and bare-soil tray at the same distance and speed.

Step 3: All four trays stayed in the same room for three hours with matching light and temperature conditions. No water was added, spilled, or drained away. No soil or plants were removed. The breeze did not blow soil out. Students weighed the whole trays again and subtracted each ending mass from its starting mass.

Step 4: For this short investigation, the class treated each decrease in mass as water that had entered the air. The graph shows those decreases. Water moving from soil into roots would still be inside the weighed tray. The class did not measure rainfall, root growth, or the amount of water vapor already in the air. Their trays modeled a small part of a working rice nursery, not the entire farm.