Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink

Wonderful wet water! My first graders are "soaking" up facts about water as fast as they can! We have started a quest to discover why fresh, clean water is such a scarcity. If so much of our earth is covered with water, why is only a small portion used for drinking?

We "dove" right in by watching a short video clip from a book called One Well: The Story of Water on Earth, by Rochelle Strauss. See the link below!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m_3omxat1Y



 

My students were amazed by this video and immediately started asking a thousand questions! So I read an informational book to them and we began creating a Noticings Chart with facts about water.

Within 2 days, we completely filled up our chart because we were flooded with information!

 

 

 

Next, I showed the class a video on Wonderolpolis (see link below).

 

http://wonderopolis.org/wonder/how-much-water-do-you-need-to-survive/

 



 

We found out that it is not unusual for people in Africa to walk for 3 hours just to collect a bucket of water. 3 HOURS! We decided to have our own "water gathering" adventure. We pretended to be villagers in Africa and our job was to collect several buckets of water. We "traveled" to a bathroom on the other side of school Once we got there, we had to use smaller cups to fill up the larger buckets. Then we had to get all the way back to our classroom without spilling a drop!

 

 



The "Tribes" are ready to collect water!











Heading back to our "village"