Water Stories by Heather Dueck, Allison Santos and Leanne Zinn

Essential Question

Our project will investigate the following questions: What water stories do I hear? What water stories need to be told? How can we be part of changing the endings to some of these stories?

Purpose Statement

To build student understanding and empathy about water and people around them and an

appreciation for protecting our water sources. Our project asks our early years students to

connect to, collect and tell water stories beginning with our own personal stories and rippling out to water stories from the school, community, city and province.

About This Project

Our early years students will deepen their connections to water through walking, movement, writing, storytelling, reading, listening to stories and through collecting and curating these stories in a responsible and meaningful way. Students will learn about how their behaviours

and actions affect people and the natural environment. They will grow to see themselves as

writers and understand how the power of their voice alongside these stories can create ripple effects of change in the world.

This eye-opening, year-long, inquiry project begins with students making connections to

self, their personal experiences with water and becoming aware of their own water stories. They will then widen the lens, looking at the water stories that they hear and tell within our school and community. In the final term they will broaden that lens even further to learn the stories of issues related to water that exist within our city and throughout the Treaty Territories of Manitoba and southwestern Ontario.

Our inquiry will end with a carefully curated collection of the stories we need and want to

tell in a “Story Walk” along a well-loved local walking path. This walk will include student

selected photographs of personal connections to water and their multimodal writing pieces from the year. This will be launched with an open community invitation to join our first walk of the path. Students will answer questions and provide information about activism opportunities and to perform dance pieces associated with the project. Our hopes for the future are that this inquiry may spur on further investigations, awareness and activism in our students and the broader community.