World Water Monitoring Day is celebrated annually between
September 18th and October 18th

Educators- the following is a list of ideas to incorporate
water quality into your lessons!
  

To introduce the concept of water quality to younger students, make comparisons to human health.  Just like us, a river needs oxygen (dissolved oxygen in water), and needs to move (we exercise, water flows), and needs a certain pH (our blood is close to pH 7, which we must maintain) in order to be healthy and support living things like fish and frogs.  Turbidity is tricky for some to catch onto, but it is simply how cloudy or clear the water is- this is a direct result of the streams diet.  How much clay, or soil is the water washing away from the banks?  This will effect turbidity, as will the substrate- the material on the bottom of the stream, like rock or sand.  High turbidity looks like chocolate milk, low turbidity is simply clear water.  Have fun!

Water quality is a great way to have fun learning math!  Try to guess how many gallons of water flow through a particular stream in one minute, then learn to calculate flow for an imaginary stream, or make a guess on the parameters of a real stream.  The term for gallons flowing through a stream over a given time is Discharge.  To figure out discharge, all you need to know is the average depth of a stream, multiply this by the average width of the stream to get the area, and then multiply the area by the flow (or velocity).  Lets say a student dropped an apple in the river and the apple moved 10 feet downstream in one minute: your flow would be 10 feet per minute.  If your stream had an area of 20 feet, your discharge would be 20 Xs 10 (area Xs flow) or 200 cubic feet.  That means you have 200 cubic feet of water moving downstream every minute!  Now convert to gallons (1 cubic foot= about 7.48 gallons).

To incorporate reading and writing, have your students write an essay or a journal entry on why they think water is important, and then have them research what percentage of our bodies are made up of water, how much water we need to drink to stay healthy, how much fresh water there is on earth, how many people live on earth and what other plants and animals need water to survive.  Have them review their original essays- what would they add or change?  Have them write a letter to local legislators, or their parents, explaining why water is so important to our planet, and why we must take care of it, including some of the statistics they found.