Vision

For different topics in our project, we had different visions. For example, for water waste, we were talking more about rainwater harvesting, and our vision for that was for not only students, but also teachers, to get a good understanding of what it is, and for those who already knew, to learn new information about it. Rainwater harvesting was a way for us to show people that turning on your tap isn’t the only way to get water; you can simply put a bucket outside and boil the water; it’s as simple as that. We understand that people can’t live solely on rainwater harvesting, but we know that we can do it frequently when it rains.
For our other topic, water pollution, we knew that people already knew what it was, but we still made posters around the school. Our main idea was to get people taking action because they knew what it was. By action, we don’t necessarily mean going outside and picking up trash, though they could also do that. By taking action, we mean stopping people from littering, and that is why we did the school-wide action tracker.

Action

We had a lot of great ideas for taking action with this project, but we decided that rainwater harvesting, action trackers for other classes in our school, and local community cleanups would be the ones that would really get things done and inspire others to do the same, as well as give them ideas for how they could help in their own ways.
We started with rain water harvesting first. We created a presentation to inform other teachers and students about rainwater harvesting at the school. We then planned clean ups and cleaned up the pond in our community park and the creek near our school. We collected lots of trash not only in the area but also in the surrounding area so that the water would be waste-free even on windy days. The action water tracker was our last action. We made copies of the sheets for each of our school’s classrooms, then gathered the action trackers after two weeks and calculated all of the footprints.

Reflection & Celebration

We have a lot to celebrate as a group, not just for the work but also for having fun while working on this project. We have accomplished a lot of things that we are proud of, such as the action tracker we did school wide, the clean ups we did in our environment that made us even more aware of polluting garbage, the rain water harvesting slide show that we shared with our entire school, interviewing people about rainwater harvesting, and making posters.

After finishing this project, we realized that there were some aspects of our project that we didn’t focus on or didn’t do as well as we could have. For example, our topics were water wastage and water pollution, and for water wastage, we were talking about rainwater harvesting, which we could have done more work on if we hadn’t just spread awareness. For water pollution, we did many things, but for rainwater harvesting, we only did the slideshow and posters.