Ecology class with a difference - 6th Class

After having learned about Forests, our Ecology classes with PFC have moved to Water.  As children have already covered a lot on properties and importance of water in their Small Science classes, the teaching moved onto deeper topics.

Here's the blog written by Shahana Shameer of Grade 6: 

Okay so today we learned about….. water. On the way to the classroom, we stopped by the wetlands. We had to observe whatever we saw about the water. We saw fish, water birds, ripples in the water. 

So imagine you are falling off from Angel Falls and you are flown in to a river as a drop of water and then you end up in Pacific Ocean. And then you make realy beautiful carvings. They..ugh! The sun is bright. You are getting  what? Evaporated? And you are a cloud.  These are all the things that may happen with the water. Its the water cycle!

We  looked at maps of old Chennai and current Chennai. We saw the water bodies what has changed. A lot of water bodies just aren’t there anymore.

We learned about big dams. Did you know dams have a negative impact on the ecosystem.  So when a dam is built that area behind it gets flooded. And all the animal there die. And there are special trees – mangroves - that fish lay eggs near it. And because of the dam, those special trees can’t grow because of the water that can’t be reached. And because the trees won’t grow, the fish won’t feel safe to lay eggs because it thinks it won’t be protected. So even the fish population goes down. And the other fish that feed on that fish will starve and die and it goes on. And what is happening over there? The Ecosystem is getting ruined.

Now the question is how will we store water now if there are no dams well we can use the Eri system. So the Eri system where you dig up a whole acre of land like a dent in the ground. When people dug Eris in the olden times in Tamil Nadu, (they did not have dams) they used their hands or simple tools to dig it unlike today when we use machines. When we dig, what do we get? Silt. People used that silt on their fields for agriculture. 

The way Eris are structured, is on one side there is Bandh like a closing so it won’t go to other places and if it is over flowing, it will flow to another Eri by a creek. And so every Eri will be connected. Now since every creek will be connected to some Eri and finally it will flow into a river. So help to not make dams! Please…….