Education
The Water Science School offers educational resources for all who wish to learn about water. Instructors and students may find useful content to aid in their quest to discover all there is to know about our most precious resource, water.
New! Classroom Teaching Guides
New! Classroom Teaching Guides
Our Water, Our Lives: A Series of Water Units for Intermediate Elementary aids teachers in helping students realize that they can contribute solutions to water-related challenges with their unique experience and knowledge.
New! Water Cycle Diagram
New! Water Cycle Diagram
Our newest diagram depicts the global water cycle, as well as how human water use affects where water is stored, how it moves, and how clean it is.
Teacher's Resources for Water Education
Teacher's Resources for Water Education
The USGS Water Science School offers many resources to teachers to help them teach their students all about water.
Water in Our World: Exploring Storage and Movement in Different Environments
In this lesson plan students will investigate and compare where water is stored and how it moves in six different environments: deserts, forests, urban areas, suburban areas, coastlines, and agricultural regions. This activity aligns with NGSS standards for middle school-grade science education. This lesson plan utilizes USGS "Where's the Water?" poster set for guiding material.
Our Water Our Lives: Floods
This Teacher Guide includes background information, lesson plans, and examples of student answers for four lessons about floods. The Student Worksheet includes student activities and questions. This can be downloaded and printed or transferred to a digital classroom document.
Our Water, Our Lives: California
This Teacher Guide includes background information, lesson plans, and examples of student answers for four lessons about water resources in California. The Student Worksheet includes student activities and questions. It can be downloaded and printed or transferred to a digital classroom document.
Our Water, Our Lives: The Chesapeake Bay Watershed
This Teacher Guide includes background information, lesson plans, and examples of student answers for three lessons about the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Student Worksheet includes student activities and questions. This can be downloaded and printed or transferred to a digital classroom document.
Teacher's Resources for Water Education
The USGS Water Science School offers many resources to help teach students all about water.
Activities
In this section of our site you can answer challenge questions, participate in opinion surveys about water issues, and take true/false quizzes. For most of the activities, your answers will be entered into a database and, after answering, you'll be shown how those in other states and areas of the world responded. You can hit Submit and view the responses even if you don't complete the activity.
Principal Aquifers
An aquifer is a geologic formation, a group of formations, or a part of a formation that contains sufficient saturated permeable material to yield significant quantities of water to wells and springs. This site explains the geology of aquifers and provides a general overview and maps of the principal aquifers of the United states.
Water education posters
Could you benefit from visual aids to help teach others about water? Here we offer downloadable posters that cover where water is stored, how it moves in different environments, and we showcase various ways in which we use water. Some posters have additional information or related lesson plans to help students get involved in the learning process.
Science in Your Watershed
The Science in Your Watershed website helps you find scientific information organized on a watershed basis. This information, coupled with observations and measurements made by the watershed groups, provides a powerful foundation for characterizing, assessing, analyzing, and maintaining the status and health of a watershed.