Teaching Science Practical Lesson #3 With My Students || Filtration...

Hello Guys!,

I've realized that my Science Students were very interested in the practical lesson taught yesterday. They are progressively being able to demonstrate how our local alcohol popularly know as "Akpeteshie" being prepared from palm. So today, we want to demonstrate "how water from river which contain sediments can be purified for drinking."

"Review of last practical lesson"

Before then, let's quickly recap our practical lesson on simple distillation. We learnt that two miscible liquids such as alcohol and water like "palm wine" with different boiling points can be separated through simple distillation set ups. Through boiling of the palm, the alcohol turns into vapour at 78°c passes through the metal tube. The second station of the coiled pipe condenses or cool it as we learnt in change of state of matter from vapour (gas) to liquid is by cooling. The could alcohol is collected as distillate. After 100°c the water in the palm wine begins to boil, with the help of the thermometer placed at the lid of the barrel help us to detect the exhaustion of the ethanol from the palm wine. Now it's assume that the vapour coming through the pipe at this time is water content.

Introduction

In most of our villages here, the main source of water is river. With this only few places which the landscapes have valleys and mountains are noted to have rivers. Water collect on the surface of the land is noted to being contaminated with some sediments or residues of leaves, dust, tree branches refuse polythene materials and other biochemical products. Due to illiteracy among some of the local people, they ignorantly drink the water from these contaminated rivers without boiling and purifying them. The resultant effects are the infection of cholera disease and other water borne diseases which would be studied in our subsequent lessons.

_{A well labelled diagram of filtration using pen & sheet of paper. drawing was done by me}

How water from river is purified safe for drinking

To some scientist, they would go straight by demonstrating how to purify the water without first boiling. The reason being that they have other alternative like addition of chlorine (chlorination) to kill all the germs which is mostly done during purification of water for large communities. When preparing for individual or small village use, you've to first boil the water in a cleaned container and hygienic environment. The essence of boiling is to kill the germs found in the water. Leave the water to cool for some minutes for beginning the purification.

Apparatus/Things needed to purify water from the river

1• water from river

2• empty cleaned container

3• White cloth

4• Big funnel

5• stirring rod

Procedure/method of purification

After boiling the water fetched from source of river, make sure to set up the apparatus as follows:

place the funnel at the mouth of the container. If it's a large container with the large open then you've to get the help from your neighbour.

Lay the white cloth on the funnel. At the laboratory demonstration, students are require to use filter paper. Since we are purifying for home consumption is best we use white cloth. Make sure to cover all the circumference of the funnel with the white cloth to avoid splashing of the water into the container.
Gently pour your boiled water into the white cloth white cloth. You can use the stirring rod to stir making sure that the filtrate drain into the container.

After all the water has drained into the empty container, we would see sediments settling on the white cloth.

We can now keep the filtrate collected in our water storage tank or cooler safe for drinking. This is a simple method of purifying water in our villages. However on commercial basis, the contaminated water has to pass through a lot of processes like introduction of alum and chlorination. To demonstrate to student at laboratory, we use graduated measuring cylinder, filter paper, beaker, funnel, stirring rod and the river water. When students are taught practically how they should carry out filtration at school, they would be able to apply it in their homes in everyday life.

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Teaching Science Practical Lesson #3 With My Students || Filtration of River Water With Sediment Safe For Drinking