What can water teach young children about science, curiosity, and caring for the planet? Author and educator Ann Gadzikowski, MEd., joins us to discuss her new book, Every Drop Counts: Exploring Water Science with Young Children in a Changing Climate (Gryphon House, 2025). Drawing on her collaboration with her daughter, a water scientist, Ann shares how educators can inspire scientific thinking and environmental stewardship—beginning with joyful, hands-on play.
How simple water play helps children develop curiosity, problem-solving, and early STEM thinking.
Ways to introduce environmental awareness and stewardship through age-appropriate exploration.
How the book aligns with the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework and Next Generation Science Standards.
Strategies for addressing children’s (and adults’) eco-anxiety with reassurance and curiosity.
Why play—and time outdoors—is the foundation for future scientific and environmental understanding.
Practical classroom ideas for introducing water systems, the water cycle, and conservation through play.
“Go outside and play as much as you can. Get wet, play in the mud, and get messy—that’s the most important thing.” — Ann Gadzikowski
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd is an award-winning educator, author, and curriculum designer specializing in early childhood STEM and critical thinking. Her latest book, Every Drop Counts, empowers educators to teach science through wonder, play, and environmental care.
What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of our interview.
Emily Garman: Welcome to Early Childhood Chapters, a Gryphon House podcast where we talk with authors and experts who bring research to life in early learning settings. I'm your host, Emily Garman. In today's episode, we're diving into one of the most essential topics in early childhood education, and on our planet: water.
My guest is Ann Gadzikowski, author of Every Drop Counts: Exploring Water Science with Young Children in a Changing Climate. Ann is an educator, curriculum designer, and award-winning author known for her work connecting big ideas like critical thinking, STEM learning, and now climate education to the joyful, play based experiences of early childhood. In this conversation, we'll talk about how even our youngest learners can begin exploring the science of water; how to introduce environmental concepts in age appropriate ways, and how curiosity can be a powerful antidote to climate anxiety. So pour yourself a glass of water and join us as we explore every drop counts.
Thank you for joining me today and it's glad to have you here.
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: Thank you Emily. I'm happy to talk to you today.
Emily Garman: Well, let's start with your inspiration for this book. So what led you to write Every Drop Counts, and how did your collaboration with your daughter, who is a water scientist, shape the ideas in the book?
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: Well, I should probably begin by saying I'm not a scientist and I'm not an expert in science. I'm a preschool teacher and a preschool director, and I became really interested in science and Stem topics through working with children.
But this book, Every Drop Counts is really special to me because I collaborated with my daughter. Her name is Alexa. She's all grown up. She's a water scientist. And I became interested in in water, specifically its impact on the lives of young children from hearing her talk about her research. So she is an engineer. She studied civil engineering and environmental science and worked as an engineering consultant for a while, focusing on water.
And now she does hydrology research, and her work right now focuses on the wave patterns of Lake Michigan, which is really interesting to me because I live here in the Chicago area, and every time I look out across the lake, I think about my daughter in the work that she's doing. So over the years, she's talked a lot about water, and I'm constantly thinking, what does this mean for children?
So a couple of years ago, I began specifically creating and piloting activities for young children that are related to water. I had a wonderful experience one summer of doing a whole week of water curriculum with young children at a school near me called School for Little Children, and learned a lot from the kids from doing that. And then the program where I work now, I'm director of a nursery school in Chicago called Families Together Cooperative Nursery School, and we have piloted some specific activities for children ages 3 to 6. And we've called it climate explorers. And they're activities that are focused on water, but also on climate. Water and climate go hand in hand as topics, and children seem to really enjoy these, these activities and focusing on water. And, through my work with my daughter, we decided that we would write this book together.
Emily Garman: You describe water as being magical to children. So why do you think water captures children's curiosity so naturally? And how can teachers harness that wonder for learning?
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: Well, I like to say that children are already water experts. They use water and play with water and have experiences with water all day long. They wake up in the morning and wash, take a bath or use the toilet and flush the water down the toilet. They wash their hands at school, they drink water. They might play with water in a sensory table.
So they're having experiences with water all day long. So they already know a lot about water. It's something that they have a wealth of experience with. Even if they can't put it into words. It's something that they know a lot about and specifically around play.
I think one of the things that children find really fascinating about water is how it moves. If you give children water to play with, if it's in a big bin or even if it's outside, or even if they're in a swimming pool or along the beach, one of the things they're going to want to do is splash. They're going to want to pour. They're going to want to watch how the water moves down a drain or in waves along the shore.
So it's the movement of water, I think, that children find so fascinating. And of course, that's because it's a liquid. So there are certain properties, scientific concepts that are really relevant to the water experience that children are experiencing all day long.
Emily Garman: In the book, you write that the most important role of the child is to be a child. And that's more important now than ever, I think, as we are focusing on skills earlier and earlier. So I really love that you focus on the important work of the child is to be a child. So how can educators introduce serious topics like climate change, in ways that are hopeful instead of overwhelming and on a scale that's appropriate for young children?
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: Well, I want to be sure to say that I'm not advocating for directly teaching young children about climate change. I don't talk about climate change with preschool children. I talk about water. I talk about weather. I talk about plumbing and all the different ways that water might come into our homes or into our schools. When I said it's really important that children have the chance to be children, it's because some of the threats related to climate change impact children's play.
So there are a lot of early childhood programs where outdoor play has been limited because of heat or because of what, air quality related to, sometimes related to fire wildfires, or other kinds of extreme weather conditions. So I'm concerned about children not having as much time and opportunity to play outdoors. And I think learning to love nature is really essential for children becoming really invested in protecting the planet.
So just having an opportunity to play outdoors, I think is probably at the very top of that list. So that's how we can ensure a joyful future for children is if they have opportunities to play, if they have opportunities to love nature. And a lot of a lot of the good things are going to follow from that.
And the opportunity to play, children are going to have a chance to learn about cause and effect and to solve problems. Any opportunity to play with other kids. Children are going to learn to communicate. They're going to learn how to collaborate and cooperate and to solve problems together. So all of this is relevant to climate change because as the children grow up and have more complex problems to solve than even we as adults have now, they'll be best prepared for that if they've have those wonderful experiences in their own childhood.
Emily Garman: I think that is really interesting, what you just said. You frame play as the foundation for scientific inquiry and problem solving. And in a future love of learning and just being curious about the world. Can you talk some more about that open ended play which water lends itself beautifully to, really helping children begin to think like scientists and engineers?
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: I think one of the most important things for children is to have an opportunity to be curious. So even in a preschool classroom where a teacher might bring an idea to children, if the teacher is directing that experience, the children have missed an opportunity to nurture their own authentic curiosity. So if we give children very open ended experiences with water, if we just go on a water hunt outdoors, where can we find water outdoors?
And what will they find? And we give them the opportunity to to direct and initiate what what happens next? Maybe they'll find a puddle and they want to splash in the puddle. Maybe they'll find, a sprinkler and they'll want to run through the sprinkler. Some of that might not be ideal, but it comes from the children.
It's their sense of curiosity. It's their questions. It's their inquiry. So that's what's going to be meaningful for them. And that's what we want from our scientists, right? We want them to ask really good questions and to become really passionate about finding out the answers. So that's the ideal process. And that comes through free, child-directed play.
Emily Garman: Now in terms of standards of learning, this book is aligned with the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes framework, the NAEYC standards and the Next Generation Science Standards. So when you were thinking about putting the book together with your daughter, how did those frameworks guide your approach when you were putting the book together?
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: Looking at all three of those sources, so it was really affirming to this idea of the importance of water science in early childhood, because it became really clear that it is developmentally appropriate to scaffold these concepts. Beginning in the very, very beginning of a child's learning experience. And at age two and three, as I mentioned, they're already having a lot of experiences with water.
It was really amazing to me to see how often water is mentioned, even in the infant toddler standards, because they're having these cause and effect experiences. They're learning to care for themselves and to keep clean. And these are all foundational experiences that we can build on so that when they're older children, when they're having more complex or rigorous science learning experiences, they will already have that foundation asking questions.
Looking at, observing for, different kinds of behaviors or phenomenon in the environment. The Next Generation Science Standards, of course, go all the way up through high school. So it was really clear to me that these kinds of science experiences in early childhood that are based on play are an excellent foundation for the kinds of learning that's going to happen later.
Emily Garman: Talking about the book a little bit and and digging into it more for folks who haven't had a chance to look at it yet. One of my favorite things about the book is the way you've structured it. So each chapter includes sections called explore, play, and experiment, plus a section called Ask a Water Scientist. So how do these features and structuring the book in this way make science accessible to teachers who might feel like they're not science people? Like, I don't know how to teach this even to young children. I think it's really well suited for that. Talk a little bit about why you decided to do that.
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: I think it's really important to build curriculum on children's interests, emergent curriculum or inquiry based learning. But that's hard to do now if you don't have a lot of experience as a teacher yet, or if you are accustomed to using a curriculum where the lessons are written out in great detail with specific instructions. This is a little bit different from that, but by writing each chapter with these sections, that first section is Explore.
So it's a little bit more open ended. And then the next sections have to do with how you narrow the focus based on what children are interested in. And then we offer some specific experiments that you might want to do if the children are interested in those things. So it offers a path. So on the one hand, it is a really helpful resource to teachers who are interested in water science.
But what I also hope is that for a teacher who's interested in being more responsive to the children's interest in their teaching, I hope that this structure also helps them to do that, that you can observe the children document their questions in their inquiries. You can narrow it a little bit more so that they have other play options, and then you can narrow it even more and maybe offer them a specific science experiment that they might be able to do.
So having the confidence to give up a little bit of that teacher control and let the children guide the learning; I hope that that structure helps teachers. And then the Ask the Water Scientist section, that's the section that my daughter, the hydrologist, wrote, in that section that also speaks to confidence building in the teacher, because most of us are not water scientists.
And even even a question like “why is water called H2O?” like we always say H2O? Well, what does that mean? I mean, I know I learned that at some point in high school, but I'm not sure I remember it. So why is that? So there's a section on that. So I hope that having some of those water science concepts explained to teachers at the teach in the teachers language, in that in a conversational tone, the way teachers would talk to each other, I hope that that will build confidence for teachers who might say, well, I don't know science. I can't teach science. I think that with that information, you would feel confident sitting down with children and asking them good questions about what's happening with the water and what are they curious about learning next?
Emily Garman: And so much of a teacher's work, I think, is translating these really big concepts that can be as technical as we want to get, and making them relevant to a very young child. And you touch on that too in the book, this emotional side of climate change and I am asking this question from a personal place. I have a child who's a bit older than preschool level, but kids hear grownups talking. They hear teachers talking. Maybe they might hear or see the news. And there are some scary topics that are around climate change. And like you said, you don't teach climate change, overtly to very young children. But I know my kid is very concerned about things that are happening in the world. And, water shortages. So you talk about a concept like eco anxiety. So how can educators support children and them and themselves when these topics about environmental change might bring up worry or fear in children?
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: Yeah, I think we need to be aware of our own feelings and anxieties. I think parents that I work with are definitely concerned. And as I was working on the book, I was thinking a lot about early childhood programs in communities that have been touched by extreme weather. I was thinking especially, there are a couple of hurricanes with a lot of flooding during the time that I was working on the book, and I was thinking about the families and the early childhood programs in those communities and what those children would be thinking.
One of the, elements of the book, and an important part of my teaching, is how we use picture books in children's literature, when those are issues that, when there are issues that are scary in some way. There's one specific book I can mention off the top of my head. It's called When the Storm Comes, and it's a very simple picture book, really colorful illustrations.
And it's about when a storm comes. But it's very nice in that it takes the anticipation, we know that a storm is coming. So the child in the family, they bring some of their patio furniture indoors. And then during the storm, there are adults there who are keeping the child safe and the electricity goes out. But they have other ways that they can get light; I don't remember if it was candles or flashlights in the illustrations. And then after the storm, people come out of their houses and they clean up together. And I think it's a very reassuring picture book. And that's what children need. We don't want to scare children. We want them to know that there are adults who are going to take good care of them, and we want them to know that they can help.
They can have a role in it, but we want to reassure them. And then we're thinking as adults, we're thinking ahead to the future. Well, it would be really helpful if a child understood a little bit about the weather so that they know if it starts to rain, it doesn't mean that a hurricane is coming. They start to understand the differences between different kinds of weather and what weather is expected in the community where they live, and how caring and careful adults get ready for bad weather that's coming, and then how we help each other clean up afterwards.
I think that's the message, and a lot of it comes back in my mind--there's the very famous quote of Mr. Rogers, of Fred Rogers, who said, “when something bad happens, look for the helpers.” And I think that's a theme that a lot of these wonderful picture books do is tell the story of people who have been through something scary, and then they figured out how to help each other and their work, caring and caring grownups who were there, who were taking care of the children.
Emily Garman: Well, and discussing how adults are responsible for helping children feel safe and taking care of things for children, brings up the question that I think a lot of people are talking about lately, which is how these emerging technologies like AI, artificial intelligence are having very real environmental impacts that we see immediately, and looking into the future.
So one of those consequences is very high water consumption by the data centers, because they have to keep them cooled all the time. They're just computers in giant buildings running all the time. So I think this is a reminder, certainly for us adults and older children, that these human innovations always connect back somehow to natural systems.
But for young children, I mean, how can educators help young children begin to understand that connection between that science and technology should go hand in hand with stewardship and care for our planet?
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: Yeah, I think this comes back to, what I'd already mentioned that we're setting a foundation for later learning. So we're not having to tackle all this in our preschool classrooms. But one of the concepts that I enjoy sharing with young children is the idea that we have water on our earth, we have water in our oceans, and that's all the water that we have. We're not getting any new water. And essentially that's the water cycle.
And children as young as three and four, they can begin to understand that we have a certain amount of water here on our planet Earth, and we're not getting any more. It's recycled through things like rain and snow and other kinds of precipitation. The water goes up into the clouds and then it comes back down again.
There's another really wonderful picture book that I can mention called All the Water in the World. And it's beautifully illustrated. And it talks about how all the water in the world is all that we have. the water in the oceans, the water in the clouds, the water in our soil that soaks into the ground when the rain comes.
This is all the water that we have, but we keep using it over and over again. So I think when children begin to understand this idea that we have a limited amount of these wonderful resources on our earth, as they grow older, I think they'll be ready to take responsibility for caring for that planet.
And there are small things, of course, that we can do. Children can help turn off the faucet and save a little bit of water, and not let it run. They can help us pick up litter from our neighborhood and keep the earth clean. But this idea that water is something special and then we only have a certain amount of it. I think that's the foundation for later learning, for caring for our planet.
Emily Garman: And that's something, like you said, that young children can really understand in the book. It really encourages helping children see how we live as part of a larger system than we are. We are just organisms on this planet, like so many others. And how we live with water, instead of thinking of how we control it. And I really like that tie in, setting the stage for ideas about sustainability and stewardship, which is something that we can't build in too early.
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: That's a concept that I thought about a lot because of the collaboration with my daughter within her background in engineering. When I was reading water science resources for adults, one of the phrases that I would hear come up very often is this idea of “water always wins.” Like if it's some conflict between people and water, water always wins.
And the idea is, let's say in a coastal community where there's a lot of flooding, you can try to build a wall or a dam, but the water will eventually wear that down. So my daughter and other scientists like her think of engineering solutions that allow water to do what it needs to do.
I'm thinking of communities in Miami. I saw a news story about how they're creating more natural spaces for water to flow rather than onto the concrete of their streets and their buildings. So there are more absorbent surfaces for the water to go to when it floods. Now, all of that is more complex than what we address in our curriculum activities with young children.
But this idea of working in harmony with water and in harmony with nature, I think is a really important part of the experiences that the children have. So the book does also provide a lot of resources for how to talk about plants, how plants need water, animals and sea life and how much they need water.
So, teaching about water in the context of the whole ecosystem, the whole environment and the whole planet I think is really important. We all need water, we all benefit from water. We all need to take care of water.
Emily Garman: So the book ends with a chapter on caring for water and our planet. So I know you go into a lot more detail about this in the book, but can you share for our listeners some just simple, meaningful ways that teachers can take action today with their preschool classrooms and a preview of what they're going to get in the book of how they can nurture that environmental stewardship in very young children.
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: When I asked my daughter, what do you think is the most important thing for people to know if they are going to protect and advocate for safe and clean water in their communities, she said, “find out where your water is coming from. We all turn on the tap and we take for granted that we have clean water coming out. But where is that water coming from?”
I think as adults in our communities, we can do that research. But for young children, what that translates to is the water that we use in our homes. And in our schools, because that water has been cleaned and processed somewhere before it comes to us. And then we're flushing, or sending water down the drain.
And where is it going to go? So I was surprised that children are as interested in plumbing as much as they are. I did not expect that. And I remember even in some of my first years teaching, how children were so interested in pipes and drains and where the water goes and where it comes from. I was surprised about that.
So I provide some resources that are developmentally appropriate in terms of understanding that the water that comes to us has been cleaned and so you can play or do experiments with, different kinds of paper filters, like a coffee filter in your sensory bean and, and, just play around with it to see what makes the water dirty and what makes the water clean.
You can talk to experts. Children love to go on field trips or have a visitor to their classroom who might be able to explain to them things about how water works. They can play with pipes. There are some really wonderful pipe play sets that children can build with, and you can use them with water. So understanding that children's curiosity includes what my daughter would call the “built environment.” So how how water works within their own world, I think that's really important.
But I want to be sure to wrap up with something that I already mentioned. I think the really core piece of this is children's opportunity to play outdoors in nature, and to have joyful experiences with water in nature, whether that's experiencing the rain coming down, splashing in puddles or seeing how the birds play in the birdbath, or running through a sprinkler, or walking along the beach and getting their bare feet in the water.
It's those sensory experiences. It's those beautiful, joyful experiences with the people they care about and the people who love them. That is what is going to build the engagement and the commitment and the excitement and the joy around taking care of our planet in the future. That's the real seed that we're planting. So go outside and play as much as you can and get wet and play in the mud and get messy. That's the most important thing.
Emily Garman: That's terrific. And thank you so much for joining us today. Ann Gadzikowski, author of Every Drop Counts from Gryphon House books. Thank you for reminding us that every drop, and every child's question, matters.
Ann Gadzikowski, MEd: Thank you Emily.
Emily Garman: To learn more about Ann's book, Every Drop Counts: Exploring Water Science with Young Children in a Changing Climate, just visit Gryphonhouse.com where you can read sample pages, find related resources, and order your own copy. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review Early Childhood Chapters wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps us reach more educators like you who are making a difference every day.
I'm Emily Garman. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Early Childhood Chapters.