Dear all,

I recently had the privilege to have 2 hours of contact time with school children (age 9-10) in a German primary school. It was actually the class of my oldest daughter. The topic was of course, sanitation.

With this post, I want to share with you the presentation that I gave (in German), just to give others a starting point if you get given the same task. You find it in ppt format in the SuSanA library here:
susana.org/lang-en/library/library?view=...eitem&type=2&id=2019

Feel free to use and adapt my slides if they are useful for you!

I hope that everyone will get into this habit of taking things from Susana and also giving back as a matter of course. Maybe we could have a thread (or even sub-category) in this forum where we deposit such simple teaching stuff. Or a good place in the Susana library. At the moment, presentations for teaching can be found in the library either by searching for "presentation" (but some of them are only in pdf format) or by looking at the Courses and Trainings material section of the website:
www.susana.org/lang-en/conference-and-tr...terials-of-trainings
(note that searches in the Susana library don't bring up content from the page of training materials which is not quite optimal; the overall site search at the top right of the Susana website brings it up though).

I started my presentation by talking about wastewater treatment plants (they were due to visit the local wastewater treatment plant in a village near Frankfurt the day after my talk) and then broadened the conversation to include things like: what goes into our wastewater? Can everything be removed? Is it a clever system to discharge treated wastewater into our surface waters and drinking water sources? What could be alternative approaches? Does everyone in the world have wastewater treatment plants, let alone toilets? What happens when people don't have toilets? How do people, particularly children, fall sick from lack of toilets? How are diseases transmitted via open defecation and e.g. flies? Can you imagine even schools without toilets? Is there anything we could do about it?

I found a useful website that allowed me very easily to download videos from Youtube so that I could show them in the classroom where I had no internet access:
www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001002.htm

I searched Youtube for videos that are simple enough for children to understand and where language plays a minor role (as these kids didn't speak English yet).

These two videos worked really well for this target group:

From Uganda called "No place to go!" about a girl searching desparately for a toilet, running around the entire neighbourhood:



A funny video about handwashing which all children seem to love: "Dancing in the Loo":



This one I thought of showing but it's probably too fast for children to understand:
"Reinvent the Toilet" with German subitles by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (exists also with French subtitles):



And if I had had more time, I would have shown this one from a German children's TV show called Pur+ showing struvite production and a fertiliser experiment (with struvite from the Saniresch project):



This one I might have shown to show the kids the deplorable sanitation situation, but then I felt they might not understand it, and see only solid waste issues (see also discussion here: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/62-wg-...nitation-music-video):



I hope someone finds this useful. Please do also share your own teaching tools / presentations here on the forum (we can find a better sub-category for it if needed).

Regards,
Elisabeth