Water Drops to Water Towers
APW is celebrating Fix a Leak Week (March 15-19) all semester! In partnership with the Town of Gilbert, we’re using a Project WET lesson called Every Drop Counts to virtually bring meaningful learning to fourth-grade students. In this lesson, students measure a hypothetical leak and extrapolate that very small leak to observe how drops can quickly lead to gallons. If we measure an average individual leak of 2.4 teaspoons per minute, students can use math to figure out how much water that would yield in an hour (144 tsp), a day (3,456 tsp), and a year (1,261,440 tsp). Converting that huge number to something meaningful allows students to see that their little leak equates to 1,642.5 gallons per year. To fully understand the significance of leaky faucets, we then calculate how much water would be wasted if each of the 80,000 households had a similar leak - that would amount to over 131.4 million gallons wasted in the Town of Gilbert! To make sense of that huge number, we use a downtown landmark that is familiar to Gilbert students: the Gilbert Water Tower. That water tower holds approximately 50,000 gallons of water, which means in one year, 2,628 water towers would be wasted. We better fix those leaks!