Water 'bout our future

STEAM fortnight is underway and Year 1 has been elbow deep in recycling material! The enquiry question that the Year 1 children were asked to tackle was ‘Can you create houses that collect rainwater?’.

Their journey in answering this question started off with a knowledge harvest surrounding water collection, reasons to collect water as well as ways to conserve water in our homes. Over two fantastic discussions, they shared plenty about rainwater harvesting based on the homes they and their friends live in. They demonstrated the various ways to use less water based on how they live their lives at home. They even shared concerns about sustainable living in general - this just shows how much knowledge these young people have just from observing and listening.

The next step was to design their ideal water collecting houses. They did this individually on paper and surprised their teachers by how much detail they put into their designs. As scientists and architects, they knew to test out their ideas first to work out any kinks. So for their next steps, they created their first prototype housing by building lego models and theorising about where they would place various items in order to successfully collect water.

The children ventured outside to have a look at the school’s rain gutters around their classes, in the hopes of coming across something they could use for inspiration. They discovered that the larger the surface of the gutters, the greater the amount of water that was collected. Using what they had discovered from the gutters around their classroom, they decided to switch out the narrow-necked containers for ones with wider surfaces and repurposed the narrow ones to use them for their water storage tanks.

The Year 1s weren’t done yet as they then began to think of how to make the rainwater safer for drinking through filtration and set about making a plan to create filtration tanks. One particularly motivated Year 1 even went ahead and tested the filtration idea at home and brought his model to school - we love to see innovation! This model has now become the prototype that the Year 1 children will use to create their filtration tanks!

The children eagerly moved on to building a second prototype each. The idea was to test out a water collection system using plastic drinking straws and plastic bottles. The children are now back at the ‘drawing board’, making further adjustments to their designs based on what they have seen and learned. The excitement down in Year 1 is still going strong as they continue to be motivated by the challenge of creating house models that successfully collect water. Who knows, maybe there is a future engineer in our midst.