When COVID-19 pushed our school programming online, our team had to rethink a project that was built for in-person delivery. “What’s in Your Water”, our watershed and source-water education program, had always relied on Water First staff being physically present, running experiments and leading students through hands-on fieldwork. Moving it onto a screen meant redesigning almost everything about how we taught, and who we leaned on to make it work.
A pilot, and a lesson learned
With support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, we first piloted the virtual version of the program with Beausoleil First Nation and Christian Island Elementary School in the fall. That pilot taught us something important. Without a Water First facilitator physically in the room, the success of the program came down to one person: the classroom teacher. They became our eyes, ears, and hands on the ground, translating what we could only see through a webcam into something the students could actually do.
That insight shaped everything that came next.
Round two: Sagamok First Nation
Our second virtual delivery brought the program to the Grade 6 class at Biidaaban Kinoomaagegamik School in Sagamok First Nation this past February. It included two workshops. The first one had students visit a nearby body of water to measure real parameters like pH, hardness, conductivity, and total dissolved solids. The second, called “Watershed Mysteries”, taught students to analyze pre-collected samples to figure out which fictional watershed each one came from.
This time, we came prepared with what we’d learned from the pilot. We sent an improved toolkit built specifically to support the teacher rather than a Water First staff member. It included ready-made workbooks, a detailed instructional video showing each experiment, and a microphone so we could clearly hear the students instead of relying on the teacher to relay everything back to us. We stayed in close contact throughout, coordinating before each session and debriefing after.
Running a Zoom call with a room full of eleven-year-olds is its own kind of challenge — it’s hard enough to tell if a colleague is paying attention on a work call, let alone a class of Grade 6 students. The teacher on the ground became indispensable, managing the room in ways we simply couldn’t from hundreds of kilometres away and giving us a read on how the lesson was actually landing.
Winter activities, real independence
The hands-on portion didn’t stop for the season. Students built topographic watershed models out of snow rather than paper, and later took a trip to Lake LeCloche to measure water quality on-site — which meant cutting a hole through the ice to reach the water.
We weren’t there to see it firsthand, so we depended on the teacher for updates. What came back was encouraging: students compared the different maps they’d been given, worked out what the differences meant, and problem-solved their way through it together. At the lake, students began correcting and helping each other, and started asking questions about their measurements that even challenged their teacher. Over the course of the workshops, she noticed the class growing steadily more comfortable, efficient, and independent with the testing equipment.
That independence peaked in the program’s final session, when we ran an impromptu water test of the school’s own water supply. Watching through the screen, we saw students apply what they’d learned entirely on their own.
Showing what they’d learned
Wrapping up the program, students at Christian Island Elementary School put together a presentation summarizing everything they’d taken from it. Our Educational Programs Manager, Dillon Koopmans, described the moment as a turning point for the virtual format. The students’ own reflections showed that real learning, not just information transfer, had happened, even entirely through a screen.
The bigger picture
Across both communities, the same lesson kept surfacing: virtual delivery only works when there’s a strong, trusted collaborator in the room. The relationship with the classroom teacher turned out to matter as much as the curriculum itself. None of it would have been possible without the teachers, students, and principals in Beausoleil First Nation and Sagamok First Nation who were willing to take a chance on a program none of us had run this way before, or without funding support from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Thank you to everyone at Sagamok First Nation and Christian Island Elementary School who made this program possible.
