Water Water Everywhere

My sixth grade students just completed their first inquiry unit of the year. We were focused on the issues surrounding water access and equity across the world.

I inherited the unit from my predecessor, and was immediately struck by its opportunities. With minor modifications, we began the unit by generating inquiry questions based on this stimulus:

The students were charged with creating factual, debatable and conceptual questions. As individual classes, we sorted, resorted and combined questions until each class had developed one question that they were comfortable working on. They were:

• Why can only certain people access clean water?
• What might inspire a person to help others get clean water?
• Why do people care about helping people with water?

The unit presented so many opportunities for literacy learning. We began with non-fiction articles on Newsela to build some context for the novel that we were going to read together - A Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park. The book focuses on the journey of a Sudanese refugee, so the articles we read focused on Sudan, child soldiers and water scarcity in Africa.

The novel study paired perfectly with the students' independent reading. As we focused on theme, characterization and structure in the Park novel, they were able to apply the same learnings in their self-chosen, independent reading books. They wrote brief analyses about the themes they noticed in their annotations, based on patterns (Thanks Falling In Love With Close Reading!), and after feedback, they wrote on their independent reading books.

When we finished the novel, the students began a non-fiction mini unit. I provided articles and we practiced three different note-taking strategies: boxes and bullets, alphanumeric outlines and sketch-noting. This was my first time experimenting with sketch-noting and my students and I really enjoyed it.

My Practice Attempts at Sketch-Noting

After the practice and feedback, the students were given a new non-fiction text and chose one note-taking method to extract the main idea and key details. Although, the text complexity was higher, they did an excellent job.

The truly exciting part of the unit was next. A parent in our school works for an organization here in Ghana that helps to provide clean water access to an impoverished areas of the country. Global Communities has worked here in Accra with the people of Nima to bring fresh water through wells, as well as improving the overall hygiene of the area with latrines and education programs. Students met employees of Global Communities and we took a field trip to Nima to see the projects in action. When we came back to school, we debriefed and had a question and answer session. The evidence of learning was clear when a student asked, "What can we do to help?" We had come almost full circle back to the inquiry questions, but there was one learning experience left.

 

For a final summation of the unit, students were asked to create an eight slide Pecha Kucha presentation that focused on a message of advocacy to be delivered to their peers. It was a chance to answer the question asked in the debrief. Each student chose from a set of Creative Commons licensed images that I provided (an effort to teach some digital responsibility and information literacy), as well as provide two that they found on their own.

Frankly, the presentations blew me away. The students combined the learnings from the novel, the non-fiction texts and the field trip in authentic and meaningful ways as they presented their advocacy messages to their peers. In particular, one student had devised a plan to check back in with his peers after the unit was finished to see what changes they had made in their lives as a result of listening to all of the presentations. Incredible.