With all our figuring out, the class majority agreed that we must get our freshwater from somewhere else besides the ocean, since it's too far, to long of a process, and just way too expensive! We went back to our evolving model and updated it with the new ideas we figured out!
This naturally led to us thinking where we and others get our freshwater from! Students were asked to develop models to explain their thinking!
With so many ideas on the table for where various people get their freshwater from, we came up with three ideas to actually figure this out:
1. Go to these places and look around (but this really can't happen due to the pandemic, so we ruled that out).
2. Use Google Maps to look for freshwater sources near various places, and this could be an option during a pandemic, since it's safe to use Google Maps!
3. Find people who live in these types of places and just ask them!
1. Go to these places and look around (but this really can't happen due to the pandemic, so we ruled that out).
2. Use Google Maps to look for freshwater sources near various places, and this could be an option during a pandemic, since it's safe to use Google Maps!
3. Find people who live in these types of places and just ask them!
We first agreed research would be okay to figure out where we get our water from here in Chicago. Both the Chicago River and Lake Michigan were overwhelmingly voted for, but the size of Lake Michigan determined our best claim. Research confirmed this!
So we used Google Maps and looked at places all over the country! We found some pretty interesting things:
1. There's nothing like Lake Michigan near ANY other part of the country. While places have freshwater, the bodies of water are really small and might not have the volume of water necessary based on what people use.
2. Some places have LITERALLY NO FRESHWATER. Like what do these folks do?
Mrs. Brinza also turned to Twitter for help--since her account is public and active, people responded to this post and messaged her privately, which was great!
This really got us thinking about where people got their water from and we summarized our findings on this map. So many ideas focused on water in places we hadn't even considered...like the ground. That's super weird...maybe we should focus on that next since lots of people in lots of different places mentioned that!