Mississippi Science MAQ.1.3
The Standard
- MAQ.1
- Students will develop an understanding of the unique physical and chemical properties of water and how those properties shape life on Earth.
Diagram, utilizing digital or physical models, the water cycle and how it relates to the total amount of fresh water available to living things at any given time.
2026 Mississippi College- and Career-Readiness Standards for Science · Water Properties and Quality
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students make a water cycle diagram with arrows for evaporation, precipitation, runoff, and water soaking into the ground. They mark where water is salty, where it is fresh, and which fresh water living things can reach now.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can trace water from the ocean to clouds, then through rivers or groundwater and back to the ocean. They can explain that salt stays behind during evaporation and that much fresh water is stored in ice or deep underground.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may think evaporated ocean water carries salt into clouds or that all rain flows straight into rivers. They may count glacier ice as water animals can drink today, or think water disappears when it soaks into soil.
How to Assess It
- On an exit ticket, have students draw arrows connecting an ocean, cloud, glacier, river, and groundwater. Ask them to mark where salt stays behind and explain which fresh water a deer could drink today.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Move blue water tokens among cups labeled ocean, cloud, glacier, river, and groundwater; leave salt tokens in the ocean during evaporation.
Ask students to write what happens to river water available to plants when more snowfall stays frozen in a glacier.
Give pairs reservoir and process cards; have them build three valid routes from ocean to river, including one through groundwater.
Show a local water utility's reservoir level chart; students explain why low levels can limit tap water even when oceans are full.
Keep exploring
Related Standards
- E.1.9B
Students will demonstrate an understanding of models (drawings or maps) to describe how water and land are distributed on Earth.
- E.3.9.3
Use graphical representations to communicate the distribution of freshwater and saltwater on Earth (e.g., oceans, lakes, rivers, glaciers, groundwater, or polar...
- E.4.9A.1
Develop and use models to explain how the sun's energy drives the water cycle. (e.g., evaporation, condensation, precipitation, transpiration, runoff, and groun...
- FB.6.2
Use models to analyze the cycling of matter in an ecosystem (e.g., water, carbon dioxide/oxygen, nitrogen).
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