25th World Water Day on Friday!

Today we talked a bit more about the importance of water.  Room 2 has a good understanding that water is important for living systems, our bodies and habitats.  We thought about the idea of conservation.  The word conserve was new to many.  Students brainstormed that to conserve means - -to protect
-to keep safe
-to not waste
-to save

We talked about how lucky we are to have clean water to our homes as many people to not have an easy to access source of water and need to walk great distances each day to get water to meet their daily needs. 

We talked about ways we use water at school:
-flushing toliets
-washing hands
-cleaning desks/floors
-drinking
-painting

...and also ways we could possibly conserve water.  We realized hand washing was the way students probably use the most water.

We did a little experiment about how much water we can save by changing small habits.  We made some simple instructions on how to wash our hands...using our handing washing song to ensure we scrub enough.  We measured the amount of water we used if we didn't turn off the tap.  Then we followed the exact same procedures, but turning off the water after we wetted our hands and then turning it back on to rinse.  We noticed we could save 18 cups of water!!!! That is a lot. 

The children then made posters to tell others in our school about World Water Day and to give suggestions to others on how they could conserve water.  THINK about ways you use water in your home.  How could you conserve water?  (We discussed that turning off the tap while brushing our teeth would conserve water like in our handwashing experiement!)

We also did some good problem solving using pattern blocks.  We pretended we had a mystery bag with pattern blocks in it.  In total the bag had 15 sides.  The kids worked on the possibilities of what combination of shapes could be in the bag.  Kids started noticing patterns, as they worked through the pattern, used their doubles for adding and made great observations.  Kids realized that 15 was an odd number, so that each combination had to have a triangle in it.