What is the role of water in our lives and our community?
We are members of many communities from our school to the larger city in which we live. This storyline raises questions about the causal stories of water in our communities, specifically how and why it has appeared and disappeared over time. Historically we have known of and have stories and records of a lake that was also part of our community.
This storyline investigates the disappearance of a small lake in a specific community, but one that may not be unlike yours. The storyline asks us to notice how our community has grown—new buildings are being built, homes constructed and our community is changing slowly, becoming bigger. It makes us wonder—where is our lake?
The storyline begins by examining our community and what it has to offer us in terms of resources and our place in it. Where might we go for certain things, like water? How might we go about meeting our daily needs within our community? Some of our wonderings can be explored by simply reflecting on our lived experiences and where we might have been within our community. Viewing a map of our community might be a quick way to see where the lake is, or was and it also might provide insight on where it went. Other wonderings might require some different research—interviewing trusted adults who might have expertise and using this information to create a model of what might have happened to our lake. Even with the lake no longer here, we have a source of freshwater. Where might this freshwater come from? We might start our sourcing by using a physical model of the Earth, a globe, to distinguish our usable freshwater from saltwater and where we might find one or the other, and the quantities we might expect of each.
Our explorations take us to figuring out how lakes might form or how water travels—allowing us to look closely at ideas of Earthen materials and how they interact with water, or how forces like gravity influence water’s direction of travel and flow. We might further investigate frozen sources of water and how that might add to our understanding, as well as precipitation and the overall impact of erosion over a long period of time, as well as other weather factors like high heat. Our investigations might also lead us into the human impact on water sources, like our lake, and how we might work to control our water—both for transport but also for protection of our communities through establishing structures such as dams. With all of this evidence we might ask ourselves again—where is our lake—and revisit our initial model and revise it with new thinking.
