Brantford’s Mohawk Park is being flooded this week with hundreds of Grade 4/5 students attending the Brantford/Brant Children’s Water Festival.
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The festival continues Thursday as another 450 students will take part in 35 activity centers throughout the park.
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Festival coordinator Sue Brocklebank said students learn about water science, conservation, protection, technology, and attitudes.
“We match it with the Grade 4 curriculum when the science unit is habitats and communities,” she explained. “Our idea is to really inspire our young members of our community to become stewards in the future.”
Area high school students in leadership and environmental classes ran the majority of activity centers, along with subject matter experts from festival partners that include the City of Brantford, County of Brant, Brant Waterways Foundation, Brant Community Foundation, the Grand River Conservation Authority, and the Grand River Conservation Foundation.
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Jane Pancoe of Brantford, who is going into her third year at SUNY Canton in upstate New York where she studies nursing, ran an activity center at the park’s playground equipment where the children pretended to be water droplets.
“They start out as really dirty water and go through the different processes of water treatment to come out as clean drinking water,” she explained. “We start by asking them where they think we get the water from and what they think makes the water contaminated in the Grand River. Then we bring them through the processes.”
Pancoe is working for a fourth summer at the City of Brantford’s water treatment plant on Grand River Avenue and took the children through treatment processes in a fun and abstract manner that included intake, filtration, ionization, the use of ultraviolet light, and the addition of chlorine.
“The variety of activities are amazing at helping them to learn,” said Brandi Bean, a Grade 4/5 teacher at Russell Reid School in Brantford. “They were really intrigued about where water comes from and what happens to the wastewater. That was really engaging for them to understand the whole process.”
Bean praised the high school students that engaged the children at the activity centers in a fun way.
“The way they are presenting it is so much better than you could do in a classroom.”
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