Here's another Water Freebie!

Since I just posted about the UNICEF mobile site to donatewater and keep students off their phone, I thought I should share this great ebook about different ways to get your students thinking about water.

 The book is designed for teachers in London: however, most of the activities can easily be adapted to the city where you teach. Some of them are obviously English related: write a story about a river in the shape of a river for example, but other activities that aren’t English based are great examples of tasks you can use for task based lessons.

 Keep in mind that Earth Day is coming up in the spring, so if you are planning to incorporate anything about water conservation into a lesson later, it may be best to introduce something water related now. This way when you teach water conservation later, they will be able to refer to the earlier lesson.

For example, students can animate the water cycle (MEW010) and focus on a specific tense. Alternatively, students can focus on the use of transition words.

There’s another activity where students go online and try to track specifically where the water in the school (or house) comes from. Then they track the path via the pipes to their house. This should give them appreciation of how far their water travels.

A lot of science experiments are great for getting students to talk to one another, write down their thoughts and then share them with the class. For instance, you can have students make a water filter and try to filter water you have made dirty. Later they can present their filter to the class and hypothesize what could have made it better.

Was every mission great? No. A few flat out would not work in my area. For example. When they suggest counting rain drops left on cardboard, they are envisioning a rain that doesn't come down in sheets the way it usually does in Culiacan. Bu that's fine! There are more than enough suggestions, so I can ignore the ones that don't work for my class and adapt the ones that may.

The book overall is well written. It is NOT written specifically for an English Language Teacher, but if you are like me, then you are used to adapting lessons all the time! Plus, this book has super cute illustrations by Tom Morgan Jones. 

There's also a version of the book for students without all the teacher's notes.

I saved the best part for last! There's a related website MissionExplore.net
At this site teachers (or students) can sign up and start earning basges! It is all in Beta right now, but it looks like LOTS of fun and a great way to keep students engaged and maybe get the competitive ones really working hard!