Water is Life!

This winter, class 5a at Andersen Grundschule (Andersen Primary School) had the opportunity to spend a week exploring an exciting topic: the SDG 6 set by the United Nations "Clean Water and Sanitation". Did you know, for example, that we humans are mostly made of water? Or what "virtual water" means? Learning this and many other interesting facts about water, the Andersen pupils quickly realised: Water is life!

At the beginning of the project week, our team was astonished at how much the pupils already knew about the topic. Thanks to our close cooperation with the Andersen primary school, class 5a had already prepared for the topic of water in their Science (NaWi) lessons.

The LHS Futureworks team was supported by Kerstin Kastenholz, an expert from the Education Meets Development programme (Bildung trifft Entwicklung). With her own experience in development cooperation, she gave the children a lot of interesting information and told them about local examples from the Global South.

During the first two days of the project week, the students used film analysis, quizzes and other playful methods to learn about the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and what the term "virtual water" means: it describes the water that is needed for the production of food and products.

One special highlight of the project week: a video exchange with children of the same age from our partner organisation "Rainbow House of Hope" in Kampala, Uganda! This way, the Berlin children learned how drinking water is a limited resource in Uganda and that many people do not have running water at home and have to fetch their water from wells. On the other hand, some of the Ugandan children were surprised that in Germany tap water is available everywhere and even drinkable. But of course, the children also talked about their favourite hobbies and in the end they all sang and danced together!

The second part of the project week was reserved for "Take Action", i.e. the production of creative media results. In two groups, the pupils produced an animated film for which they thought up their own story and drew all the characters themselves. In addition, a self-composed song and a game based on the well-known game "Tower Defence" were created. Have a look on the results below!