Water Changes Everything--Our Inquiry Lesson

Water Changes Everything.

This inquiry lesson was designed to help students develop a deeper understanding of how water is an essential part of the sustainability of our environment and the world around us. Before this lesson was even created, during our direct instruction lesson, we spoke about droughts and showed a video of Cape Town, South Africa and how they are about to reach "Day Zero" very soon, when their water supply will run out. One of the fourth graders asked, "What can we do to help them? We're in the United States and they're in South Africa. That's their problem, we can't help them." This statement stuck with me and my fieldwork group members. Majority of the students didn't see not having water as an issue and just because we have access to clean, fresh water, they don't realize that we can't live without it and people die without water everything single day. Before we introduced our lesson and this essential statement of "water changes everything," we reviewed our classroom rules and did a Kahoot! game for review. We had back luck that day and the Kahoot didn't load, which upset some of the kids, but to save time, we came up with review questions on the spot and asked a few students what they learned and what they remember from the previous day. The last student we called on reminded us that we spoke about droughts and specifically, Cape Town. We were so excited that she remembered because this was going to be the basis of our Inquiry lesson! Before we explained any further about what we were completing/learning about today, we showed them a video titled "Water changes everything." This video was going to be the basis of our lesson. It shows the importance of water and how it can affect people all around the world if they don't have a proper supply of water, and what we can do to help or how to conserve water.

Check out this amazing video below & see how it can change your perspective on water!

After showing this outstanding video, we asked a few students what they noticed or learned from the video. Many of the students stated that they didn't realize how having no water can affect someones live or that people in less fortunate situations have to walk miles in tough weather conditions every single day just to find water, that isn't even clean. People die from contaminated water every single day and our fourth graders didn't even know that. It was our time to show them that these people matter and there are so many ways that we can help them! This gave us the idea to create a Water Crisis WebQuest. The purpose of this WebQuest was to provide articles and videos focusing on Cape Town, South Africa and what we can do to help conserve water at home or to help others in need whether it's through campaigning or fundraising. The students were split into four groups and accessed the WebQuest on their iPads. Questions went along with each article/video and the students were to work together to discuss the questions and come up with an answer! Because of bad internet connection, a lot of our time was cut off so many of the students didn't get to finish, but I reminded them that they will always have access to this WebQuest! Many of the students seemed very interested when reading about Cape Town and watching the videos. Since we didn't have much time left, we quickly called on each group to share an idea of what they can do to help Cape Town. We planned to have each student write a letter to the people of Cape Town about what they were going to do to help and what they learned from the WebQuest that they didn't know before, but since we ran out of time, only a couple of students had the opportunity to complete this independent practice. At the end of our lesson, we introduced to the students that not only Cape Town suffers because of their water. Newburgh has been suffering a water crisis through water contamination. The entire fourth grade had no idea about this epidemic, so we showed them a short video introducing it. We hope that the students research and ask their parents about what is going on, since we didn't have enough time to explore that topic. Before the students left, we provided each student with their own plush globe as a prize for participating and being a great class! The students loved their prize and seem appreciative of what they learned from us. Overall, I wish we had more time to finish our lesson completely, but overall our ideas were great and the students really seemed to enjoy our Weather and Water lessons!