Did It Smell Like Sausages!? How the “Water Scientist Workshop” Sparked Kids’ Senses and Learning

Hello there!
Out in the great outdoors of Rusutsu, Hokkaidō, we held a workshop where kids learned all about “water.”

We called it—the “Let’s Become Water Scientists” Workshop!

On this day, we adults ended up just as surprised as the children by how many new insights bubbled up.
Here’s a little peek at what happened.

The children collected three kinds of water (from Izumikawa Farm, the Ponnukibetsu River, and local spring water), then tested them with their own hands—smell, color, pH, temperature, and more.

Using off-the-shelf test kits and strips, they observed everything with the seriousness of little researchers!

We adults laughed it off—“No way, sausages?”
But when we actually sniffed it… well, it did have a faint sausage-like aroma!

Nature’s smells can be surprisingly distinctive—the kids taught us that instead.

“Water upstream is always colder, right?”—that’s what everyone assumed.
But when we measured the temperatures…

The kids reminded us how important it is to learn from actual data, not assumptions.
Even the teachers said, “Let’s re-survey this,” with serious faces. Future researchers—fearsome indeed.

Parents joined in too, taking on the tests as a family.
Together, they used droppers to add water, then read the components from the color changes.

“Which color does this match?” “Huh, looks like it has less iron than our tap water at home.”
The room filled with the focused buzz of a hands-on science class.

Some even said, “Can we take a kit home and test our tap water?”
In a few families, the parents got more into it than the kids (true story!).

In the second half, everyone summed up the day’s findings in an “observation notebook”

• Water’s color and smell
• pH and temperature
• What they personally felt or found surprising
• And a drawing of their very own discovery!

“It smelled like sausages. It was clear, but it didn’t look tasty.”
It’s so honest it made us chuckle—but that kind of viewpoint is exactly what matters.

Using their notebooks, the children gave short presentations.
Each one shared what they felt and learned, then received a completion certificate and a Water Scientist badge!

The proud faces behind those badges said it all.
It was a day when their “eyes for observation” grew a whole lot sharper.