How Much Water Does It Take to Wash Our Hands?

SDGs 4, 6, 11, 12

Subject

Social Studies

Grade level

Early grades (PreK-2)

Submitted by:

CUNY College of Education

About the lesson

This activity is centered around water conservation and is built to develop sustainable habits in our daily classroom routines such as hand washing. When the class lines up to wash their hands at the sink we will close the drain so that the water collects. Afterwards we will transfer the water into a measuring cup to see how much water it took for the the whole class to wash their hands once.

The next time we wash hands we will close the drain again but this time the children will try their new approaches based on the ideas we discussed as a class such as shutting off the faucet while you lather your hands.

Afterwards we will measure our water usage from the second attempt, compare it to our first attempt, and discuss: did we achieve our goal of using less?