This week the Year 9 Geographers have enjoyed a field work visit to Carsington Water and the National Stone Centre in Derby. In the morning, we travelled to Carsington Water where we were greeted by an officer of the Wildlife Trust. He gave us a quick tour of the area and explained the need for the reservoir – something which the students study as part of their GCSE course.

We then went into the Severn Trent work room where the students were set a challenge! They learned about how water from the reservoir was filtered and cleaned by Severn Trent and their challenge was to clean a sample of reservoir water themselves using a variety of pieces of equipment. 

Funnels, jugs, cups, paper towels, sieves and filters were amongst tray of equipment they were given. In the space of 15 minutes, they had to work out how to make the dirty reservoir water clean enough to drink! The Students were divided into teams and judged on the volume and clarity of water at the end. The task proved difficult but all teams managed to produce clean (ish!) water in the end.

After a picnic lunch, we travelled to the Stone Centre where students looked around the Tectonics exhibition. Part of the exhibition had a computerised seismograph and tremor mat. Some of the students were very successful with applying enough force to the tremor mat to simulate a strong earthquake on the seismograph!

Luckily the sun was shining and we had a fantastic day out learning about water transfer and tectonics in the field.