The water cycle, taught nine ways.

Year 5 finish the unit by writing an explanation text, and the posters will hang in the Year 3 corridor before the younger children start their own work on water. Each child uses a teacher-chosen Adobe Express template on the school's education account, with space for a title, a diagram built from shapes and arrows, and four numbered paragraphs explaining evaporation, condensation, precipitation and collection in the present tense, using causal words such as because, so and when. The teacher checks each draft against the explanation text checklist from literacy lessons, and children correct it before printing. The posters are marked and put up.

Tools: Adobe Express Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over two lessons, Year 5 pairs make a short picture book for Year 2 that follows one drop of water from the sea, up into a cloud, down as rain on the hills and back along a river to the sea. Each page has a drawing made with Book Creator's pen tool or a photograph of a drawing, one or two sentences of text, and a recording of the pair reading the page aloud, which they play back and re-record until it sounds clear for six-year-olds. The teacher reads each draft and asks one question about the science on each page, such as whether anyone could see the drop while it was water vapour. Books stay in the class's private Book Creator library, and Year 2 listen to them on tablets in their own classroom.

Tools: Book Creator Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Over three lessons, Year 5 pairs turn what they know about the water cycle into a working model in Scratch, on class accounts the teacher manages. The teacher provides a starting project with a sea, hills, a sun sprite and a slider for sun strength, and pairs write the rest: vapour sprites that rise from the sea faster when the sun is stronger, a cloud that grows each time vapour reaches it, and rain that starts once the cloud's water variable passes a level the pair chooses, then runs down the hill into the river and back to the sea. Pairs test their model by moving the slider and checking it behaves as they expect, then fix it when it does not, for example when the cloud rains for ever because its variable never goes down. In the last lesson pairs try each other's models and write under their own what it shows about the cycle and one thing real clouds do that it leaves out.

Tools: Scratch Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 5 have met the water cycle and now check they can explain it without the teacher's diagram. The teacher sets a Seesaw activity showing a landscape with sea, hills, a river and sky, and a set of items to move: the labels evaporation, condensation, precipitation, collection, water vapour, cloud, river and sea, and four arrows. Children drag each label and arrow into place, then write underneath which way the water moves and why the arrows make a loop. The teacher looks through the finished work after school and uses it to decide which children need the loop explained again the next day, as the old worksheets were checked.

Tools: Seesaw Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 5 carry some stubborn ideas about water: that clouds are made of steam, that a puddle soaks away and is gone, that rain is new water. The teacher builds a twelve-question Kahoot aimed at them, such as "What is a cloud made of?" with water vapour, tiny drops of water, smoke and dust as the options, and "Where does a puddle's water go on a sunny day?" Pairs join the live game under their table's name rather than their own, and after each question the bar chart on the board shows how the class answered. When more than half the pairs go wrong, as usually happens with the cloud question, the teacher stops and breathes on a cold mirror so the class sees invisible vapour turn into visible droplets, then asks the question again. The lesson ends with each pair writing down the three ideas they changed their minds about.

Tools: Kahoot! Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 5 know that the sun evaporates water from the sea, but it is hard to believe when water vapour cannot be seen. In pairs, children open earth.nullschool on a laptop with the teacher's one-page guide, which walks them through three overlays. First they switch on total precipitable water, which shows how much water the air is holding, and spin the globe to find the wettest air, usually over warm oceans near the equator. Then they switch to sea surface temperature to check whether the sea is warm beneath the wettest air, and finally follow the wind streams from one wet patch to see where that air is heading and whether rain is falling there. Pairs record three places, the evidence for each stage of the cycle, and one question the globe raised, which the teacher collects for the plenary.

Tools: earth.nullschool.net Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 5 are starting the water cycle, and the teacher wants every stage anchored in something the children have seen. The PowerPoint holds eight photographs taken around the school: a playground puddle first thing in the morning and the dry patch at lunchtime, wet footprints fading on the hall floor after PE, condensation on the inside of a cold classroom window, clouds building over the field, rain falling on the playground, water running along the gutter to a drain, and the nearby river after a wet weekend. The teacher shows each photograph, names the process it shows, evaporation, condensation, precipitation or collection, and adds it to a diagram that builds up on the final slide. Children copy the finished diagram into their books, labelling each arrow with its process and one of the photographs as an example.

Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

Year 5 have learnt the four stages, and the teacher wants them to see the cycle working at a scale the playground cannot show. On a showery day the teacher opens Windy on the board, starting with the cloud layer so the class watches bands of cloud drift in from the Atlantic, then switching to the rain layer to show where it is raining across Wales and England. The teacher zooms in on the school's area and plays the next few hours of the forecast so the class can see when the rain is due, and children keep an eye on the window to check. Children write in their books where the clouds came from, what lay beneath them before they formed, and draw the path from ocean to cloud to rain over their town.

Tools: Windy Nine ideas for your own version in Generate

The day before, the class put a little blue-tinted water in a sealed zip bag and the teacher taped it to the sunniest window, with a school tablet on a stand filming it in time-lapse from 9am to 3pm. Across the day nothing much seems to change when the children glance at it, which is the point. Next morning the teacher plays the six hours back in under a minute on the board: the top of the bag mists over, droplets form and grow, and trickles run down the sides into the water at the bottom. The teacher plays it three times, pausing to name evaporation, condensation, precipitation and collection as they happen, and children label a drawing of the bag in their books with the four processes and roughly when each began.

Tools: Built-in camera (slow motion and time-lapse) Nine ideas for your own version in Generate