WATER SCIENCE EDUCATION

2017, Sacramento, California, USA

Mianna Muscat hosts water science education

Mianna Muscat, of the MET Sacramento, has been involved in several previous Caring for Our Watersheds projects, including tree plantings and park clean-ups. This year, her focus was on expanding watershed education for her classmates. She wanted to find a way to engage students outside the classroom, educate them on the processes that provide water for the state, and connect them with nature. Mianna proposed a trip to the Headwaters Science Institute, during which students learn about the snowpack driven water cycle, how albedo affects rates of snowmelt, and methods scientists use to track the snowpack which makes up much of California’s water. Mianna’s proposal and implementation funds from Nutrien helped all 30 students in class to attend the trip and get this hands-on field experience in the area of Water Science and Management

BIODIVERSITY DAY

2017, EDMONTON, ALBERTA, CANADA
Biodiversity Day
Simran Panesar takes tree planting seriously. Since she started in the Caring for our Watersheds contest in grade 8, Simran found new and exciting ways to plant trees, improve biodiversity, and educate youth about their watershed.

In this year’s project, Simran had moved onto high school, but wanted to engage grade 6 students (who have a science unit on trees and forests) students from her junior high school to come get involved. Her implementation took 4 parts:

Part 1: Presentation and Pizza. Grade 6 students from A. Blair McPherson school arrived to W.P. Wagner School where they listened to Simran’s presentation about the event. They were then treated to a pizza party lunch!

Part 2: Art Project: The school’s art teacher helped lead an environmental art project for the grade sixes. They put leaf impressions into clay and made little slabs. These slabs will be fired in a kiln and then compiled into a huge environmental display. This display will be a “contemplation project” and hung up at Wagner.

Part 3: Biodiversity Game. The grade 6 students learned about the importance of biodiversity in the watershed by a game which teaches how different bird beaks adaptations allow them to eat different foods.

Part 4: The final step was the actual tree planting. 45 native trees and shrubs (including Saskatoon, Lodgepole Pine, and Red Osier Dogwood) were planted in the schools yard.

Simran was able to make space for biodiversity at her new school while engaging and educating youth.

“I just wanted to thank you for inspiring me to make a positive difference in our world! You have inspired me since the day you came to our school when I was in grade 8 to talk about Caring for Our Watersheds and the experiences I’ve gained from this competition are priceless”. -Simran

Education Lesson Plan

2017, Carman, Manitoba, Canada Hannah and students student action

Hannah Petrie from Carman Collegiate felt there was a lack of education regarding climate change. Given her experience working with kindergarten and Grade 1 students through an internship program, she determined education was the key.

“I believe teaching the young students will promote a lifestyle that contributes to healthy environment, since they are the future. The lesson I create can be taught by other teachers, I would be willing to share the documents and information needed to reiterate the lecture; the lesson does not need to only be delivered by me. Allowing other teachers to have access to my lesson would only benefit the watershed additionally.”

Hannah created her lesson plan and has already delivered it to local elementary students. Teachers are encouraged by Hannah’s enthusiasm and determination for this type of awareness lesson to spread.

Slam Poetry

2017, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Breela Bailey Slam Poetry implementation Manitoba

Breela Bailey from Miles Macdonell Collegiate came up with a simple yet effective way to spread awareness of watershed issues to both youth and adults. She decided to write and produce a slam poem about watershed health and create a video to spread awareness.

“The reason there aren’t many changes being made is because the lack of education. Educating people will make a difference on a larger scale. This is sure enough to start off as a local project but we are hoping that once put out to the public it will be all over Canada. We hope this will affect everyone and show what big differences we can make in our own homes.”

Breela, along with a friend who narrated and donated the use of the equipment, put together a powerful video, which is now available for everyone to view on youtube.

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIYXoqDoVQQ

Losing Tides – A Watershed Awareness Dance Show

2017, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Hunter Watson and Alyssa Lee from Westwood Collegiate came up with one of the most unique projects seen to date. They chose to look at Watershed Awareness through Dance with spectacular evening including dance, watershed information booths, and guest speakers from watershed community partners. Losing Tides Watershed Awareness Show Student Project Manitoba

“As students who are very involved in the arts in school and around the community, immediately we were reminded of how often we are told about how much dance can have an impact on people. That thought gave us the idea to create a dance show with every dance revolving around water and our watersheds. The damages we have done to it, the beauty it has, and how important it is to preserve it.

Each dance will have images projected on the screen that will help to enhance the dance and its losing tides watershed awareness show manitoba meaning. Some dances will deal with the pollution side to our effect on our watersheds, some will focus on how our watersheds could and should look like all reflecting behind the dancer.

Seeing the issues and solutions through dance, pictures and speakers that can range from high school students to well-known organizations will surely leave an impact on the audience. This is something that has never been done before but we are confident we can do this right.”

This event attracted over 200 participants and ended with a well-deserved standing ovation standing ovation.

Turning Trash into Treasure

2017, Cinncinnati, Ohio, USA

Tori Lyon and Veronica France developed a project called Turning Trash into Treasure, focused on improving their watershed (the Mill Creek) by reducing the amount of plastic bags that end up as litter. The project consisted of two parts, phase one and phase two. They began their project by educating their school community through daily announcements informing classmates on the importance of keeping their local watershed clean and the detrimental effects of plastic bags on turning trash into treasure ohio student action project the environment. After kick-staring the education portion of their project, they started working on implementing phase one.

Phase one of the project consisted of collecting plastic bags from their school community and distributing reusable cloth bags to the students. Tori and Veronica set up a station in a busy hallway of the school where students could turn in their plastic bags. For every 25 plastic bags a student turned in, they received a custom made, reusable cloth bag. Inside each cloth bag was an informational flyer containing more facts about the Mill Creek watershed and the detrimental effects of plastic bags as litter. In order to keep track of how many bags were brought in, each student who donated plastic bags filled out a slip with their name, grade and number of bags brought in. This provided Tori and Veronica with an easy way to account for the bags donated. After they held a week-long bag collection event and distribution at school, they transitioned into phase two of the project in which they created sleeping mats out of the collected plastic bags.

ohio student action project trash into treasure Phase two started with a bag prepping party at which everyone folded, cut, and looped the plastic bags into balls of “yarn”. This ball of plastic yarn was then crocheted into sleeping mats that were donated to the homeless. They conducted significant amounts of research on how to properly crochet plastic sleeping mats, as well as the benefits of sleeping mats for those who are homeless. The mat weaving process was very time consuming and involved intricate work, so the students sought out the help of their school community for completing this part of our project.

They had an overwhelming response to their project! Tori and Veronica were hoping to collect about 2,000 plastic bags, but received over 17,000 plastic bags. Since this was such a great number of bags, they are planning on donating the extra bags to Matthew 25 Ministries where groups of volunteers work to complete similar projects. They will continue to make mats until the end of the year.

Their project reached a large scope, and they were able to help improve the condition of our watershed.
Treasure

What’s the Buzz

2017, Berthoud, Colorado, USA

Delaney and Emma identified a lack of interactive and educational games available to students online that teaches the current situation regarding bee populations in their watershed. To solve this problem, the students designed an online game that raises awareness and the positive steps that can be taken to help protect the honeybees in the area.

The main character in the game is Buzz the Bee. Buzz flies through several backgrounds and landscapes point out to game users the different positive and negative effects in the environment that can support or harm bees. The players then experience a series of educational questions that help them recognize the relationship of bees and human life. The what the buzz student project game colorado answers to the questions are recorded and a final report is give at the end of the game. Players can then use this score to identify how they can better help the bees in the watershed. The game can be found at: http://whatsthebzzz.com/

Pollinators: A Community Commitment

2017 Greeley, Colorado, USA

Aubrey Chacon and Monica Chacon
Union Colony Preparatory School, Greeley, Colorado

Aubrey and Monica engaged elementary students, teachers and community members to plant
pollinator gardens in Northern Colorado. They designed and taught each group about the impact pollinators community commitment student implementation pollinators have on our environment then helped each group create a garden. Each garden included flowers that attract butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds. They created gardens at four schools and three churches around Northern Colorado. In addition, Monica and Aubrey distributed garden designs and seeds to each person so they could create their own gardens at their homes.

“Phyte Club”

2017, Greeley, Colorado, USA

Dustin Elkins and Alexandria Riesberg phyte club project implementation colorado
Greeley Central High School, Greeley, Colorado

In a school district where over half of students meet federal poverty guidelines, many students in the community do not have access to organic, healthy food and face cultural separation from the food they eat and where it
comes from. The spiraling growth of processed food and the food industry has created a relentless carbon footprint, which can be battled through local community gardening. By starting a garden program growing organic produce at the school, Dustin and Alexandria are providing classes and students with a hands-on resource to learn about their food, combatting the industrialized food processing industry (reducing the carbon footprint of food packaging, waste, and transportation). Once the school gardens begin to produce, they will donate the vegetables to the students who participated in creating the garden. In addition, they will sell the produce to the school lunch program through the Garden to School program. The money generated will be used to fund the upkeep and future development of the garden.

Jacob’s Big Project

2017, Cinncinnati, Ohio, USA
Jacob
Jacob’s big project is a coloring book for kids developed and designed by Molly Mariani, Abi Barret and Ashley Moher. The coloring book has several interactive pages that gets students of all ages involved in the conservation message. Along with the book, Ashley, Molly and Abi designed several worksheets for different age children. The one for younger students has pictures and the kids describe whether it’s helpful or harmful. The worksheets for older kids include a vocabulary sheet.

The team knew from the start that they wanted to do a project that involved younger students. They didn’t just want to design a book, so they thought if they made it more interactive, they could get younger students to understand their role in protecting the environment. Designing a coloring book that the younger students could color on was one way the girls could get the students more involved. They also made a change to their original plan by adding the interactive worksheets so that they could measure the students understanding of the problems and test their knowledge. The addition really boosted their project because it allowed them to measure their success through the kid’s ability to complete the activity worksheets.
Jacob
To implement their project, Ashley, Molly and Abi visited local schools, which included a preschool and an elementary school. For the preschoolers, they read the book aloud to them then the preschoolers completed the “helpful or harmful” activity. For the elementary school visit, the kids read along with the story and colored the book. After the book was finished, they completed the vocab sheet to apply their knowledge.