Sixth grade students at Pieper Ranch Middle School will be participating in a project that spans all four core content areas for the month of February. The main goal is to create a persuasive campaign to collect donations for an organization called wholives.org and earn enough money to have a well drilled at a school in Africa. Currently, many children in Africa can’t attend school because they spend their days walking long distances to get water for their families to survive. At the end of February we will have a culminating event called “Water Week” in which students will showcase their learning and have one big fundraising push for donations. In Social Studies, students will be reading the book A Long Walk to Water to gain a better understanding of the life and culture in Africa. A Long Walk to Water is based on the true story of Salva, a Sudanese boy who is separated from his family by war. He survives starvation, animal attacks, and disease, and ultimately leads a group of about 150 boys to safety in a refugee camp. This poignant story of Salva's life is told side-by-side with the story of Nya, a young girl who lives today in one of those villages. She spends her days walking to and from a water source in order to provide enough water for her family to survive. Their stories eventually connect when Salva returns to Nya’s village to drill a water well. After reading this book in Social Studies, Math will be making personal connections between the student’s own water use and that of the children in Africa, as well as getting to experience their own water walk and comparing it to Nya’s. Science will be learning about water conservation, layers of the earth, and how wells work. ELA’s focus will be on empathy and persuasion. Students will be creating an advisory lesson for all students on campus that will focus on the importance of empathy. Students will take what they have learned from the book and the connections they have made in their other classes to effectively write a persuasive letter home seeking donations to help build a water well at a school in Africa. Each core content subject will have their own piece to contribute to the overall campaign to raise money and to showcase during Water Week.
Pieper Ranch Middle School