Every Last Drop: Bringing Clean Water Home

by Michelle Mulder

Overview

In the developed world, if you want a drink of water you just turn on a tap or open a bottle. But for millions of families worldwide, finding clean water is a daily challenge, and kids are often the ones responsible for carrying water to their homes. Every Last Drop looks at why the world’s water resources are at risk and how communities around the world are finding innovative ways to quench their thirst and water their crops. Maybe you’re not ready to drink fog, as they do in Chile, or use water made from treated sewage, but you can get a low-flush toilet, plant a tree, protect a wetland or just take shorter showers. Every last drop counts!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459802230
Publisher:	Orca Book Publishers
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Series:	Orca Footprints Series , #4
Pages:	48
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 9.60(h) x 0.60(d)
Lexile:	1050L (what's this?)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Michelle Mulder is the author of several books for children. These days, when she's not writing or going on adventures, she enjoys reading, swimming, baking, hiking, and pedaling her bicycle around Victoria, British Columbia, where she lives with her husband and daughter. For more information about Michelle and her books, please visit her website www.michellemulder.com

Table of Contents

Introduction 6

Chapter 1 A Drop to Drink

Slurp It Up, Buttercup 8

Hey, Water! Come This Way! 8

Well, Well, Well 11

The Forgotten Flush 12

Scrub-a-dub 12

Three Cheers for Gravity! 13

Look Out Below 15

Full Steam Ahead! 15

The Great Stink 16

Gushing Away 16

Chapter 2 Riding the Water Cycle

Water, Water, Everywhere 18

Dinosaur Drinks 19

Swamping the Swamps 21

Check Out These Pipes! 22

The Water Drain 24

Chapter 3 Pump It Up

Drop by Drop 26

Making Change 28

Getting the Nasties Out 28

Nailing the Problem 29

Drinking the Ocean 30

Sipping Sewage 31

All Bottled Up 32

Spot On 33

Chapter 4 Deepening the Well

Flushed with Pride 34

Ready, Set…Rain! 35

Gulping Weather 36

Thirsty? Plant a Tree 37

Fog in Your Cup 38

Drops by the Bucketful 39

The Ripple Effect 41

Resources 44

Acknowledgments 45

Index 47

Editorial Reviews

02/03/2014
Writing with candor as well as some humor, Mulder gently urges readers who live in the developed world to never take fresh water for granted in this addition to the Orca Footprint ecology series. Chapters focus on the history of human efforts to harness and clean water, the water cycle, and how world nations have found innovative methods to access water (for example, in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, families remove the salt from their water using desalinating devices run on sunlight). Photographs of individuals from around the world collecting and using water put the topic in vivid focus, as do statistics that note that one in six people “don’t have access to clean water. Almost half of those people live in Africa.” Ages 8–12. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Young people will be amazed by the global initiatives: filtering arsenic-contaminated water in Bangladesh with iron nails, harvesting fog to gather fresh water in Chile, and more. Catchy 'Go with the Flow' headings, startling water facts, and color photos of children collecting and conserving water around the world make this high-interest reading."

Booklist

"Nothing could have prepared me for the wealth of information presented in Every Last Drop...What makes these forty-eight pages of nonfiction so wonderful for readers is the style chosen by Michelle Mulder to present the efforts of her research...Liberal use of photographs, diagrams and sketches become a part of the layout and design of the text making...[it] an outstanding nonfiction title. Every collection will want to have a copy of this pertinent presentation on a timely topic."

Librarian's Quest blog

"This accessible and engaging nonfiction book sheds important research about water around the world. The author combines personal stories with interesting facts to raise awareness in an effort to encourage personal responsibility about water usage...Classroom and school libraries will want to include this important nonfiction book in a text set about sustainability of natural resources."

Reading Today Online

"Packs a lot of punch with its very informed look at drinkable water situations in various countries around the world."

Southwestern Ohio Young Adult Materials Review Group

"[Mulder] uses personal stories and includes many well-researched facts to make the telling personal and of great interest to those who read her book. The beautiful, clear photographs up the interest...The captions are informative and useful for classrooms."

Sal's Fiction Addiction blog

"Mulder's conversational style is very readable and she tells so many anecdotes of families and communities around the world that this is a fascinating book."

Resource Links

"This engaging book takes on the important task of explaining clean drinking water to middle school students...The writing style is a very accessible mixture of personal travel stories and interesting facts ..It can be hard to find good books on sustainability issues for middle school students. This well-written book will be a welcome addition to any classroom or library collection. It will support any research on water usage and will be popular with students interested in getting involved with environmental issues.
Highly Recommended."

CM Magazine

★ 04/01/2014
Gr 4–6—Mulder's latest addition to her solid repertoire of environmentally conscious books addresses the crises (pollution, shortages, etc.) of the global water supply. Her conversational style keeps the material from being too clinical or gloom-and-doom, without ever seeming superficial. Ideal for reports, the book is packed with great information on everything from the way civilizations have collected and used water throughout history, sobering assessments of the present and future availability of clean water, and intriguing solutions already employed, such as fog catchers, or that are still in their experimental stages. Worthwhile factoids, sidebars, and interesting photographs accompanied by instructive captions add to the abundance of meaningful material. Mulder is honest about the emergency unfolding around this precious resource, and though the situation is fairly dire, she empowers her readers by offering feasible suggestions that individuals can use to improve things. And like raindrops falling into a collection barrel, each and every single conscientious action adds up. An excellent resource on the topic.—Alyson Low, Fayetteville Public Library, AR

School Library Journal

2014-01-15
You turn a tap. The water flows: clean and, if not abundantly, at least steadily. You are the lucky one in two humans. Mulder's book will make readers stop and calculate. Not only does half the world's population not have a ready water supply, but often what they do have is filthy—perhaps contaminated with microbes and arsenic—or plain poisonous. This account is particularly handy, as it goes back to the beginning, to the water cycle and the humans harvesting water: how it has been collected and distributed throughout history. The great Middle Eastern and European aqueducts, the deep wells, dew nets—truly feats of engineering marvel. It moves through the Middle Ages and, with them, the real start of water contamination and the spread of water-borne disease. Lavishly illustrated with everything from woodcuts to photographs, the book is far from downbeat and scolding. Much is being done to source and purify water, and much is also being done to work on the sanitation issue. Mulder writes with a clean, no-nonsense style that demonstrates that people have finally come around to realizing that only 1 percent of the water on Earth is potable and we must be careful of this resource. Informative, attractive and alarming—readers will think twice before leaving the water running as they brush their teeth. (Nonfiction. 8-12)

Kirkus Reviews

"Through accessible language, this text supports environmental and ecological inquiries while also raising awareness about global initiatives."

The Dragon Lode

"Young people will be amazed by the global initiatives: filtering arsenic-contaminated water in Bangladesh with iron nails, harvesting fog to gather fresh water in Chile, and more. Catchy 'Go with the Flow' headings, startling water facts, and color photos of children collecting and conserving water around the world make this high-interest reading."

Booklist