We started doing theme study a little differently and I'm letting the kids ask questions and then we either look them up online, read it in a book, watch videos on it, and/or we do experiments.
Last week we learned about tugboats and how they work. We were able to watch a "How it Works Video" that the kids loved.
This week our question was, How do we get clean water? We started out drawing on the SMART board how we get water. The kids included a lake with pumps and pipes coming out of it and going to houses through ditches. The pipes and ditches wrapped all around the houses and connected each other. They even had pipes to connect to the sinks, toilets, showers, and the kitchen. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't take a picture.
To learn more we watched videos about how water gets to our tap and how drinking water is made. After seeing those videos we decided to make a water filter.
Today we made a homemade waterfilter. We went out to the alley and gathered water from the puddle. Then we came in and built a very simple filter out of a liter pop bottle, sponges, cotton balls, steal wool, and a coffee filter. Look at the pictures and see what a difference it made!