Now that we KNOW the water in Lake Michigan is different than the water in our tap, we developed initial models for what exactly is going on in that building!  We're trying to put ideas together over time...knowing a few things:

1.  Some of the substances we detected in water were added.
2.  Others were removed.
3.  All of these substances are dissolved--we did NOT see them at all in either the water sample from the lake or the water sample from the faucet.

We're putting these ideas out there in developing our initial models.  We're seeing if we can develop a model that PREDICTS, based on scientific knowledge we've developed over time. 

Check out some of the 5th grade initial models of what happens at the purification plant!  We have some competing ideas on how dissolved substances are added:  microbes, chemicals, filters, screens, earth materials, machines, people...

​We can't wait to figure this out!

After all our looking at blueprints and maps, we figured out that we do indeed get our water from Lake Michigan and there is this building there we think does something with our water. That's the purification plant!

We weren't convinced as to what actually happens there, so we decided to go through with the water tests to reveal just exactly what the differences where between the water samples. We uncovered the following:

1. Some things (dissolved stuff) are at a lower value in the lake than in our tap.  This means they are added somehow between the lake and our homes.
2.  Other things are at a higher value in the lake than in our tap. This means they must be removed somehow, again, between the lake and our homes.
3.  The stuff that's either added or removed is REALLY small, since we couldn't see any of it in either the tap water samples we took or the lake water samples Mrs. Brinza did.

This is leading us into thinking...

What exactly happens at the purification plant to make our water drinkable and safe?

So after some investigation ideas, we wanted to use blueprints and maps of various kinds to figure out where we get our clean water from in our houses!  Here are the images, online maps, and research we did:

From our blueprints, we couldn't really tell much since they were only located to the lines of a specific property.  However, they did confirm that there are pipes (lines) that contain clean water and lines that carry out water that leads to the sewer.

From there, we wanted to see if there were blueprints for the City of Chicago, and the underground pipe map didn't tell us much other than there were distribution piping. This is helping us understand that there are definitely pipes that distribute water all over the city, not from wells.

We still didn't know where we got our water from, so we turned to the ArcGIS maps, which we discovered something similar to a WWTF down by Navy Pier.  When we zoomed in on it, the labels didn't tell us what it was, so we turned to Google Maps.

And Google Maps revealed it was a purification plant!  This is a thing!  

And someone in class suggested these red and white things that are far out in the lake  might be somehow connected to the purification plant.  So with some research, we figured out they were intake cribs, which means we get our water from Lake Michigan!

We realize from all this that there's something going on at the purification plant to make our water "purified" but we're not quite sure yet.  So from here, we first want to see if the water in our tap and the water in the Lake are similar and different...and how this might help us figure out what exactly is going on at the purification plant!

Despite suggestions of getting water testing kits at Walgreen's, aquarium stores, Amazon, or Walgreen's, Home Depot came through! They carry fairly affordable water testing kits that we will test our water and the water in Lake Michigan--since we can't do a school field trip to test the lake water on such short notice, students suggested Mrs. Brinza go to the lake over the weekend, test the water, and video the evidence.  Here's hoping the weather holds out to do these tests!

We decided that because of Chicago's VAST amount of impermeable surfaces, limited groundwater documented on the USGS maps, along with the fact that we don't see lots of well caps around the city, we probably don't get our water from groundwater.  However, this got us thinking about where we actually do get our clean water from, and we spent time developing some initial models.  Here are some examples of student work:

We've got lots of ideas that we summarized into the following as a class:

Since we don't have a lot of agreement and there's lots of ideas floating around, we decided to think of investigations we could do to determine the two parts of our question:

1.    Investigations to figure out where our clean water comes from.
2.  Investigations to determine if the water we get from our faucets is the same or different from the water at the source.

By the looks of it, it looks like Mrs. Brinza has some intense HW tonight to figure out how to make these investigations happen!

From all our groundwater investigations, we've figured out a lot of answers to all our questions by building physical models, looking at groundwater site maps, watching videos, and communicating with people who use groundwater.  We went back to our DQB today to see what we've figured out, and boy have we figured out a lot!

We decided our next steps should be regarding our own water source. While we know that Chicago has some permeable surfaces, it doesn't have a lot of them, which is making us think we can't possibly use groundwater since it wouldn't refill as quickly with the overwhelming amount of people we have living here.

Tomorrow we're going to share out our initial models from where we get our clean water from...leading all the way to the pipe that connects to our faucets! What competing ideas will we have?!?!?!

Knowing how water gets underground (or doesn't get underground because of a surface's impermeability), we decided we wanted our next steps to be if the water that did go underground was clean or not.  We know from our contact in KS that her family uses groundwater, but we're not really sure what this means for its quality.  

Students suggested we put a camera down INTO THE GROUND, but that wasn't really possible. But Mrs. Brinza turned to youtube and realized there was some work being down by well diggers that could help us see what happens to the water when it goes down deep into the ground, entering a well.  

We figured out that the water that reaches the bottom of where the well is drilled is CLEAN!!!  What!?!?

We had a really intense conversation about how the water that gets deep into the ground can actually get rid of anything that's in the water by trapping it in the really small spaces that are between the pieces of soil. This was MIND-BLOWING to us that "dirt" or "dirty things" could actually clean water!

We decided to put this new found knowledge into action and design our own filters to clean the dirty water we had sitting on the window ledge. Students had combinations of sand, soil, and gravel to use, and boy did their water get cleaner!

Despite our water getting cleaner from the small spaces in the earth materials, there were some limitations to our models.  We learned from our well video that the average well is around 200ft deep, and our small cup-based models were really small comparatively. So we decided to make a bigger model to see if we get anything different!  Regardless, the water is certainly cleaner by sending it through earth-materials rather than using human-made filters (like colanders and coffee filters). We then established consensus for what we figured out!

From all our groundwater experiments, we figured out the following:

1.  Water seeps into the ground from events like rain or ice/snow melting.
2.  We know there are little spaces between soil and sand particles (we saw this under the microscope).
3.  Land that's connected to bodies of water has water seep into them, too.

This made us wonder if every place has this happen to it, since it seems like lots of places have groundwater.  We took two screenshots of places we've had familiarity with recently: Dodge City,  KS and Chicago, IL.

​This got us thinking...

And we noticed that Chicago is not looking all natural like Dodge City's surfaces.  It's covered in a lot of asphalt and cement. So we wanted to see what happens to these surfaces when water is poured on them.

Both the asphalt and the cement didn't let the water soak into them, so we're starting to think about why. We also noticed that around some trees we noticed these grate-like things with holes in them, and our sewer covers had holes (or empty spaces) in them, too. In fact, the sewer cover outside of school was actually SO FULL we could see the water. This is kinda gross to us knowing what we know about our sewers and the type of water that's in them!

Mrs. Brinza also took a ball to the street--as a model for a water particle to see what would happen to it, and it rolled to the edge of the street towards the sewer cap.  

From all this, we're building a consensus model for how water gets underground, and also for how water doesn't get underground.  It's also making us think about how if water doesn't end up in the ground, then it ends up in the sewer, which we already know leads eventually to the ocean. And if there's so little freshwater compared to salt water, wouldn't we want to put water back into the ground rather than having it end up in the s