Bring flood learning into your classroom
Hull and the East Riding is one of the UK's highest flood-risk areas. That means teaching our region’s children about flooding, the water cycle and flood resilience is crucial to helping them better understand where they live.
Living With Water offers free, curriculum-linked education sessions for primary schools, delivered in school by our team. Sessions cover the water cycle, the causes and impacts of flooding, and what families and communities can do to build flood resilience – bringing real, local examples into the classroom.
All sessions are free of charge and available to schools in the following postcodes: HU2, HU3, HU4, HU5, HU6, HU7, HU8, HU9, HU10, HU13 and HU16.
What we offer
School assemblies
Our interactive assembly can be anywhere between 20 and 45 minutes long and is designed to bring flooding and the water cycle to life for the whole school. It covers how the water cycle works and how its components can contribute to flooding, what flooding means for communities like ours, and the importance of having a family flood plan.
The assembly includes a role play activity and a video showing how the Living With Water partners are working together to increase flood resilience and how communities can get involved. It's designed to prompt conversation in the hall and back in the classroom.
Future Blue-Green Designers Project
Our team has created a Living with Water T-Level module, named the Blue-Green Designers Project, aimed at children ages 16-18. The course is best suited to students studying geography, science, or engineering, or those who are part of an eco group.
Over several lessons, students will be taught by Flood Risk Management professionals. They will learn:
- The ins and outs of SuDS and how they work
- A hands-on approach to reviewing real-life Sustainable Drainage schemes
At the end of the course, students will be asked to design their own scheme, balancing many factors such as budgets, staffing, and community sentiment, with help and advice from our team.
Their work will then be presented to a panel of professionals in an interview-style setting, giving students a chance to experience how an interview panel may feel and exposing them to a professional setting.
For more information, please email us at enquiries@livingwithwater.co.uk
Classroom workshops
Our one-hour classroom workshop gives pupils the chance to explore flooding and the water cycle through four hands-on activities, delivered in rotation so every child experiences all four.
We can deliver up to four one-hour workshops during a single school day, making it straightforward to run sessions across multiple year groups.
A practical activity based on the water cycle
An investigation into the rate of water flow through different materials
A discussion about the importance of having a family flood plan
A decision-making activity around building a flood kit
School partnerships to bring flood awareness to life
Our work with schools goes beyond the classroom. Where our infrastructure projects are delivered near schools, we look for opportunities to involve pupils directly, giving them a voice in the design process and a say in the outcomes.
Bilton Community Primary School
When Living With Water delivered a series of sustainable drainage schemes across Bilton, the village’s primary school became an active part of the project. Working with Year 6 pupils, our team ran a co-design session that started with a lesson on the water cycle to explore how little of the world's fresh water is available for use and why managing rainwater carefully matters so much for communities in our region.
Pupils then took on the challenge of designing green spaces for their own school grounds. Their ideas fed directly into the final scheme, which was developed by engineers at Stantec and includes rainwater planters connected to the school's roof downpipes, a swale, an expanded wildlife pond, a tree pit with underground water storage, and redesigned playground markings – all of which the children helped shape.
The result is a school site that stores 400m³ of water during heavy rainfall, reduces surface water flood risk for the surrounding area, and gives pupils a living, working example of flood resilience that they can see and learn from every day.
Rosmead Street
Children from Estcourt Primary School near Rosmead Street were also given a hands-on role in Hull's first permeable paved street. Pupils were invited to help lay some of the final permeable paving blocks and took part in flood resilience lessons tied to the real scheme being built on their doorstep.
Try the SuDS game
Add an interactive element to your lessons on flooding and sustainable drainage through our SuDS Game.
The game lets pupils step into the role of a flood resilience designer, choosing from a range of sustainable drainage solutions (SuDS) and placing them across real local street scenes from local places including Rosmead Street, Orchard Park and Bilton.
It's a practical, engaging way to explore how SuDS work, why they matter and how the decisions communities make shape the places they live.
The game works well as a follow-up to a classroom workshop or assembly, or as a standalone lesson activity.
Get in touch
If you'd like to book a session, find out more about what we offer, or discuss how Living With Water can support your school's curriculum, get in touch with our team.
