Julie is a mom to a 6-year-old boy and and 3 1/2-year-old girl. She
has two blogs that she welcomes you to check out. You can read about her
activities with her kids at Just Playin’ Around. You can read about all the books they read at My Book Retreat.
This is the first day of Geography Awareness Week 2010. The topic this year is Freshwater. According to National Geographic,
only about three percent of Earth’s water is fresh, and most of this
water is frozen in icecaps and glaciers. As the world’s population
grows, so does our demand for fresh water.
We have a pond out
behind our house, so I decided to explore it with my kids so they could
better understand where ponds come from and the importance of this
source of fresh water.
How does a pond form?
Before
visiting the pond, we reviewed the water cycle. We talked about the fact
that water evaporates from the earth, forms clouds in the sky, and then
comes back down to the earth as rain or snow. We talked about how ponds
and lakes are filled with rain water, as well as water that comes from
rivers and other waterways that originate in mountains and other higher
elevations.
Our pond is mostly filled with rainwater, because
it’s a retention pond that was created when our housing development was
built in order to ensure that rainwater is collected in a manner that
does not disturb the surrounding land. Rainwater flows into the pond
from our neighborhood roads and sidewalks. This helps prevent flooding
by taking water in quickly and releasing it out slowly into natural,
undeveloped areas. In addition to the water flowing into the pond,
whatever comes along with it also ends up there. This may include oil,
trash, and lawn fertilizer, among other things. The retention pond
enables pollutants to settle to the bottom of the pond, rather than
being released into nearby streams and other natural areas. Water
remains in the pond for a certain amount of time in order to allow the
soil to filter out the pollutants. The retention ponds in our
neighborhood are a type of storm-water best management practice (BMP).
Continue reading Julie’s full post at her blog!
http://just-playin-around.blogspot.com/