Water Education Resources

NACD's mission is to serve conservation districts by providing national leadership and a unified voice for natural resource conservation.

Is water important to your daily life? The answer is yes, and here is why: We use water each and every day. Some of the direct uses are cooking, cleaning and brushing our teeth. There are many indirect uses that sometimes we forget how much water is needed to produce items we use everyday. The food you eat each day relies on water and good soil to produce it. About 4,000 gallons of water are needed to grow one bushel of corn, 11,000 gallons to grow one bushel of wheat and about 135,000 gallons to grow one ton of alfalfa. It also takes 30,000 gallons of water for to manufacture 1 ton of finished steel to build the vehicles we drive.

Water is important to us each and every day, and we all must work together to take care of it.

A Few Facts about Water

Of all water on earth, 97.5 percent is salt water, and of the remaining 2.5 percent fresh water, some 70 percent is frozen in the polar icecaps. The other 30 percent is mostly present as soil moisture or lies in underground aquifers. In the end, less than 1 percent of the world’s fresh water (or about 0.007 percent of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human uses. It is found in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and in underground sources Water is the only substance found on earth in three forms solid, liquid, and gas.
A person can live more than a month without food but only about a week, depending on conditions, without water.
66 percent of the human body is water; 75 percent of the human brain is water.
The average American uses over 100 gallons of water per day; the average residence uses over 100,000 gallons during an entire year.

Sources: http://www.water.org/resources/waterfacts.htm and http://www.epa.gov/OGWDW/sdwa/30th/factsheets/pdfs/fs_30ann_waterfacts_web.pdf

Water Education Materials

Catalog - Review our Water Is Life catalog before you shop the NACD Marketplace and place your order.
| Low Resolution PDF (864KB) | High Resolution PDF (2.02MB) |

Water Education Educators Guide - Activities and information tailored around water use in our everyday life to use with students and adult programs. | PDF |

Water Activities

Activity Supplements (Activities in educators guide)
"Where’s the Groundwater" Vocabulary - A vocabulary list of groundwater-related words and definitions to supplement, Water Is Life Intermediate (Gr 2-3) activity "Where’s the Groundwater." | PDF |

"Clean the Water" Vocabulary - A vocabulary list of words and definitions for the "Clean the Water" activity, Advanced (Gr 4-5). | PDF |

Exhibit, Field Day and Classroom Activities (adaptable for all ages)
Healthy Water Hopscotch Activity - Participants in this printable activity learn about their own impacts on the quality of the water. This activity is great for field days, exhibits or school lesson plans.
Additional resources needed: 11”x17” paper for printing.

Instructions | PDF |
Signs | PDF |

Water Cycle Spinners - This printable activity goes along with Project WET’s “An Incredible Journey” and is great for field days, exhibits or school lesson plans. | PDF |

Additional Water Resources

Urban Water Garden Project - This project, courtesy of Northern Rhode Island Conservation District, has lessons and activities about rain gardens, teaching students what rain gardens are and how they can plant their very own.

Action Class Project on Water Outreach Information – This resource includes interactive sites, water games, videos and lesson plans, articles and quizzes compiled by students in the classes of Peggy Pennington, ACTION Teacher at the Nevada Middle School and Truman Elementary located in Nevada, Montana. The school works with the Vernon County SWCD, and they are past winners of the Lexus and Scholastic Environmental Challenge.