Sharing Your Family’s Water Stories

What was tried in the classroom?

As a part of an introduction lesson to a unit on the changes to Earth’s systems focusing on climate change, I had students ask their families at home what stories they had that revolved around water related events such as droughts, floods, tornados, etc that had something to do with the atmosphere and/or the hydrosphere. Over the next few days they returned and shared their stories through a discussion thread in Canvas.

How’d it go?

I was delighted to see a higher than normal percentage of my students actually ask the question, and share a story. They were fascinated to read about each others families. All of the stories shared were on topic, and many of them highly detailed.

Because I had students respond in the discussion thread, some of my students who never share in class discussions were able to tell their own stories. Because of the heavy use of alternate spelling and punctuation prevalent in social media messaging and posting, students were not intimidated because they aren’t great at grammar and spelling. Students were highly engaged in subsequent learning and discussions.