This general orientation to the Interpretive Center provides the perfect overview for the teacher focusing on a variety of water issues, past, present and future. Your students will be introduced to a variety of concepts and vocabulary using activity booklets in exhibits on the natural water cycle, watersheds, the water use cycle, land use and pollution. They will also learn about their individual relationship to local, regional and global water quality issues on Planet Earth.

Every day, people make choices about how they will use the land around them - often without considering how their use of land may affect the water they drink. Let your students come to understand the delicate relationship of land use to water quality through a matching card activity using the exhibits in the Interpretive Center. Students will also study a variety of maps to understand the development of land over time, and then plan fictional communities of their own in a way that would protect water quality.

Students will focus on stormwater runoff (one of the greatest sources of water pollution today), watersheds, and the different kinds of land pollution that affect our water quality - past and present. Students will explore, on foot, the Water Works site and surroundings as a way to better understand the concepts of point- and non-point-source pollution. The lesson will also give students a look into the Philadelphia Water Department's demonstrations of best management practices for existing and future land development.

The Water Works is an engineering landmark. Students will learn about the design and function of this nineteenth century pumping station and why it was the most visited public place in America at that time. Learn how innovative technology for the public good and a concern for the natural environment, beauty and civic pride all came together at this unique site. Students will become apprentice engineers as they examine the pumps and gears that put the "works" in Water Works.