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Cassandra Shaw, a Grade 5 student at St. Edmund School in Applewood Acres, has taken her mission to educate the world on the importance of water very, very seriously.
Just ask her mother.
When Shaw and the other members of the small but dedicated Eco-Kids club at St. Edmund started studying the water issue two years ago, the 10-year-old was shocked at how much is wasted in households. The students did studies at their own homes.
Shaw's mother got a rude surprise from her newly converted conservationist daughter one day. Mrs. Shaw turned on the water for her shower and let it run for about five minutes while she waited to get in.
"I turned it off," Shaw said with a triumphant grin yesterday after she and the six other Eco-Kids helped launch The Peel Water Story.
"One time she put the dishwasher on with just a few things in there," said Shaw. "I told her not to do that again. She hasn't."
Shaw and her school mates were part of a pilot program with the their teacher Grainne Maddison, to perfect the tools for The Peel Water Story before they were put into action.
The collaboration among Peel Region and the Dufferin Peel and Peel District School Boards has created a resource, consisting of a CD-Rom, a detailed book and a web site (www.peelwaterstory.ca), that will make science come alive for students ... not just in concept, but in the reality of where they live and breathe every day.
Gary Mascola, one of two elementary teachers on the original committee that looked at developing the program in 2002, said that while teachers can use the resources to teach the strands of the provincial curriculum for their particular grade levels, "curriculum doesn't drive this. This is about the watershed as an ecosystem. This story drives itself."
The history of Peel can be seen as the history of water, through establishment of mills, cholera outbreaks, and all the way to extension of the big pipes that allowed the development of modern-day Mississauga.
One of the things the Eco-Kids did in their quest to learn more about water was to tour the Lorne Park Water Treatment Plant.
"It was amazing," said 12-year-old Monique Morgan. She was impressed with the huge treatment ponds, the skimmers that take gunk out of the water, to use her technical term. She was especially taken aback by seeing the dead fish and the boot that was removed from what will eventually be the water we all drink.
The Eco-Kids came back to their own school, did a water audit, found out they can save the equivalent of 800,000 two-litre pop bottles worth of water if they get low-flow toilets and other equipment installed and are setting out to raise money to do just that.
And they can't wait to tell the rest of the school what they found.
How's that for education in action?