Playground Rivers!

Year 6 were very puzzled to see a pile of soil appear in the playground this afternoon! We then revealed that we were going to create our own Kings Copse river in the playground!

We started off by discussing the features of rivers and how they are made. Because they are so long, it is really tricky to work out how they form and how they develop. Before we began, we predicted where we thought the course of the river should go. Many people predicted that the slope of the playground would affect where the water would travel.

We started to create our river by creating precipitation (in this instance - a hosepipe!). We then watched to see how the river developed.

We noticed that the river started off quite straight but it was soon apparent that it had begun to change its path.

After a few minutes, we could see that the river was beginning to meander even more and that whilst the heavy material (stones) were creating waterfalls and pools at the top, the lighter material (such as sand) was being transported down to the mouth of the river. 

We recorded how the path of the river changed. When we turned the water on to its most powerful setting, we noticed that the river started to split and converge into lots of different smaller streams that transported the water to the sea through many different mouths.