The first spring Eko-patrola: W-A-T-E-R.

The target of the first workshop were the youngsters. They will face with the problem of water scarcity that will probably happen in the future years.

Why we need to teach the young generation?

In the future, if the water consumption will remain the same that nowadays, the potable water will be very difficult to find. And it is very difficult to find a new planet suitable for a human life.
A great example of how difficult life without water is, can be seen in African countries. Even nowadays, children can’t go to school because they need to stay in their villages and help with transport of water. They need to transport water, for kilometers, from the local source to their houses.
Water is the main resource of our life, without drinking it for more than 3 days we would die. That’s why we need to protect it. Less than the 1% of the non salt water is drinkable, which is not so much if we count that on our planet lives almost 8 billion people.

In the world there are many people who need to learn about this problem, but for the start we decided to teach a small group of 10 children from Murter. We made our first spring workshop at our old, but cozy, office in the old part of Murter. Our workshop materials can be used by anyone who wants to learn about the problem. It could be teachers who want to teach their students, it could be parents who want to teach their children. It could be just a curious people. Anyone!

We started the workshop with get-know-each-other activities. The first game was writing our names, qualities and our age on a piece of paper with shape of a puzzle. Then, after all people finished, we put all the pieces of puzzle in the middle of the table and the volunteers decided to try to pick up who wrote the note.

The second game was about drawing a portrait of other person. The handicap is that artists cannot see the other person face, and they need to draw from their memory. The game went really fun when the participants started to show their portraits to each other.

After that two warm-up games we started with other activities. The topic started with a presentation with basic knowledge about water and water circle.

Than, Ivana started an explanation of main usage of water and all ways how we waste water. After presentation we gave to children simple table where they needed to analyze how much water they use everyday in normal activities. To energize children we decided to give some outside tasks. One of them was searching for cards that was hidden outside of the office, on cards was written different types of food that they usually ate. After they found every card they need to put in order to differentiate how much water is used for each meal.

The other activity, which had to energize the children, was “how we perceive the water with the five senses”. The participants had to take pictures of how they hear the water, touch the water, etc…

For conclusion of the workshop we made an experiment where we filtrated dirt water with natural materials; rocks, sand, carbon. We tried different configuration of this elements inside the bottle to filter water in intention to see which configuration is the best.

And, how it went? I think that children were really interested about the topic. For me and Ivana this was the first time that we make that kind of workshop for the children, but it went great. We tried to make the workshop easy to understand with examples, drawings and a lot of interaction with children during the explanation. We used experiments, lot of games and one treasure hunt. That experience, that we gained, will be useful for the future workshops.

Yours Ivana and Max