Week Seven and Eight

Hello everyone!

I just got back from a rafting trip down the Salt River. It was a whole bunch of fun (and I'm a little disappointed to be back in school/inside)! Here's what I've been up to the past couple of weeks!

The Salt River

Francis Short Pond

I had the opportunity to work with the Flagstaff Stream Team at Flagstaff Junior Academy by Francis Short Pond. The Stream Team is partnered with the city to learn about environmental conservation and the Rio specifically. It was really cool to see how involved the city was in the protection and maintenance of both the Rio and Picture Canyon. A guest speaker from the city came out to teach us how to describe and explain the condition of different sections of streams called reaches. My friends and I from the Grand Canyon Youth Outdoors Club volunteered to help the fifth graders  fill out their worksheets that the city would actually be using to examine whats needed around the Pond. It was nice to see that there are different organizations involved in teaching youth about the importance of water.

Then I had a great hike in Sedona down Boynton Canyon (I definitely recommend it)!

Now, I have really delved into the activities I will be presenting the Alpine class with later this month. As I have stated before, my main objective with my lesson is to help the kids to truly understand that usable, fresh water is a scarce resource. I also really wanted there to be a hands on activity to go along with this as well. So this is what I've found:

Boynton Canyon

I was reading lessons in a book called Project Wet. Project Wet is an organization that creates action-oriented lessons which helps students learn about all aspects of water. There are lessons on Ecology, water rights, water conservation, watersheds, and the list goes on. One in particular caught my eye called "Just a Drop". In this lesson, you start with a large bucket of water-- this water will represent all of the water in the world. Next you take a small graduated cylinder and remove a percentage of the water. This water then represents all of the fresh water in the world. However, just because water is fresh does not mean it is accessible or usable by humans. Finally, you remove more and more water from all of the fresh water that represents: water trapped in ice (glaciers, ice bergs), contaminated water, and water that is trapped in the ground, animals, and plants. When done, we are left with an incredibly small amount of usable, potable water.

I feel that this lesson will really illustrate to the kids how little water we have available to us. But you might be thinking "well that's nice, but that will take about 2 minutes." Don't worry, there's more.

Next, I want to talk to the kids about the Federalist structure of water conservation. The smallest branch would be the individual. These kids have probably already heard that they should take shorter showers or turn off the faucet, so I don't want this whole section to focus on person conservation (although I will definitely still cover this). I also want to move farther away to talk about what they can do as a group of students, what they can do as a school, what we can do as a community, state, and even nation.

I feel like the best way to teach this to students is to have an interactive discussion with them. While it will not be a Socratic discussion, I would like to hear students' input, or their own ideas on how they can increase water conservation. To show how the city works to conserve water, I will talk about how our city uses reclaimed water, and the students should recognize the facility because it is right next to Picture Canyon (where they visited in a field trip). At the end of the discussion I will hand out a worksheet with a table on it. I will then ask the students to take note of each time they use water and approximate the amount of time they do it for. I will ask them to do it for just one day, but I hope that this will make the students more conscientious of their water use (and even give them a chance to implement the practices they learned). 

Some very scary wildlife

Now that I have determined what I want the students to learn, creating my questionnaire will be much easier. This week I will be finishing it up!

FYI: The Salt River is just South of Show Low and runs right through the Apache Reservation. It is a tributary to Lake Roosevelt (East of Phoenix).