Imagine All The Water

     In July I shared one of my Fav Websites, Imagine All The Water, which illustrates how much water it takes to create some of our everyday items like paper or a pair of jeans. Fast forward nine months and I am now teaching Natural Resources in Grade 10 Geography and we have just started talking about fresh water resources! Last week I showed my class the following video which showcases a group visually depicting one of the water statistics from the website using water balloons:

     We decided to use this video as our inspiration to create our own display in our school’s main hallway. When the students came into class today we divided into three groups:
1 ) Poster
– Responsible for creating a poster to explain our project
2 ) Layout
– Responsible for deciding how they wanted to organize our
  resources (cups)
– In the video they used water balloons to create a hamburger
  picture
3 ) Water/Filling Cups
– Responsible for deciding how much water they needed, based
  on what statistic they wanted to represent and how many cups
  the layout group wanted to use

     After polling the class, they decided that they wanted to showcase the statistic, “It takes 13L of water to create 1 piece of paper“, because they use so much paper while at school. The layout group quickly went to work creating a number 13 out of dark blue cups, surrounding it by white cups, and adding food colouring to make the 13 stand out. The water/filling cups group were responsible for figuring out how to divide 13L of water so that each cup was filled evenly. The poster group created a large background featuring our statistic, the website that inspired us, our class name and a visually depiction of the statistic using paper and water bottles. Here are some pictures of our display:

Filling the cups

Our finished display featuring 13L of water and poster background

A bird’s eye view showing the number 13 to represent how many litres of water is needed

Posing for a class picture

     If you haven’t had an opportunity yet, check out the Imagine All The Water website and share what statistic surprises you.