We have been inspired by the water walls that are on so many early childhood teaching sites, so when the High School students kindly made us two frames to hang our music from, we knew that they would also  be useful for other things as well – like water activities!  now that the warmer weather is here, we have put the two together and come up with – our plumbing experiments.

The setting – up appealed to the workers and fixers amongst us:

and to those who like making things work

but a job’s not worth much if it can’t carry a couple of people who can give advice…

When the boys started they discovered that all the water was running out on the ground. As our rainwater tanks are very low, and we have limited water available each day, they soon decided that they needed to catch the water so they could recycle it.

This is where our new bins came in handy.

The cooperative nature of this job, and the sense of agency in  the children who organised and solved problems for themselves, was just as valuable as the science involved.

And then there were the added dimensions of representation and literacy when two of the boys decided to draw the pipes so they could make a book about it.

We discovered that drawing a funnel is tricky!

Water really does offer a multitude of learning possibilities!