For a full description of Activities and Key Messages Click Here.
		The Grey Bruce Children's Water Festival has 46 hands-on, interactive activity centers that are educational and fun for elementary school students. Our goal is for students to enjoy themselves using cross-curricular skills to learn about the importance of water conservation, protection, technology and ecology. The festival will motivate students to become water stewards in their classroom and community. By combining the hands-on, interactive activities with messages relevant to their daily lives, students will soak up knowledge of the properties, uses, connections and importance of water. With this information, students will become aware of the value of conserving and protecting water. Plus, all activities have been designed to readily integrate with the year-round classroom curriculum.

Each Activity Centre:

• Is interactive, interesting and entertaining for young children.
• Is designed with the New Ontario Curriculum learning expectations in mind.
• Has specific messages which are clearly relevant to and easily identifiable by students.
• Contains activities and models that bridge the gap between scientific and environmental issues, daily routines and objects.
• Is designed to optimize student learning by ensuring low facilitator to student ratios (1:5)

Key Themes: Water Conservation Water Protection Water Science Water Technology Changing Attitudes
Some examples:
Conservation - Royal Flush How does a toilet work? Students examine how the mechanism in an ordinary household device works and the difference between water-saver toilets and regular-flow toilets.

	Protection - Treating trash How does a modern landfill operate? Students explore for themselves how we treat our trash today and compare this to the unsafe practices that were done in the past. A landfill model provides a breakdown of the different stages of the treatment process and demonstrates the effect on the groundwater if our trash is not disposed of properly.

Science - Great Water Race Students continue their study of porosity and permeability by watching how quickly water passes through sand, gravel and fractured limestone. Students are introduced to the concepts of slope and angle and observe their effect on how water moves through the Earth.

Technology - Water Main Break! Students will have the opportunity to see how groundwater is pumped from the aquifer to a reservoir, treated (chlorinated) and piped through a distribution system to be delivered to homes and businesses in the community. This system will emulate the systems currently in use in many communities that currently have municipal water systems in place. Students will observe the forces required to pump the water up into a water tower and the use of gravity and pressure to distribute the water through the system.

Changing Attitudes - Pioneer Water Race How did pioneers collect all of the water that they needed for their daily lives? Students participate in a race using buckets of water and pose questions and make observations to gain an understanding of the difference between Canadian communities in the early 1800s and modern life in their community. How did people function differently without our technology?