National Water Week is held in October each year to help us understand and take action to protect and conserve our precious water resources and habitats. As a registered Waterwise School, St Emilie’s always celebrates this week by educating our students about the value and conservative use of water.
The theme for National Water Week this year is ‘Water – the Heart of our Culture’ which encourages young people to explore how water shapes our everyday lives through recreational activities, the natural world and our community values. The focus here at St Emilie’s was the value of water to the Western Australian lifestyle.
The week was a call to action, challenging us all to make changes to our day-to-day lives to protect this essential resource which shapes almost everything we do. It also gives us a huge opportunity to start conversations and encourage people to learn more about the technologies and the people that keep our taps running and ensure Australia has a sustainable water future to support our economy and our communities.
Below are a few of the Waterwise learning experiences that were offered in Science this week.
The Year One students investigated ‘dripping taps’ around the school. And they found one in Year 5!! We predicted how much water would be collected from the drip and marked this on bucket.
Then we left the bucket under the drip to collect the water while we went back to class to do our work. Here are our findings.
We had a discussion about what we can do if we see a dripping tap. ‘Turn it off!’ were the replies. However, Olivia in 1G informed us all that if the drip won’t stop then, ‘call a plumber!’
We didn’t wish to waste our collected water so Mrs O’Donnell carefully poured the water onto the lawn.
Our Year 2 students did some work on their potato crops. It was time to ‘mound up’ the soil around the potatoes. Mr Cogger assists us by managing the sprinklers and turning them on, only on our designated watering days here at St Emilie’s.
Our Year 5 and 6 students learned about our big blue planet and how much ‘fresh water’ is actually available for drinking, growing food and keeping plants and animals alive. It works out that there is about 2%. This helps us to understand the importance of water conservation and why in our drying climate in WA we need to look after our most precious resource.
