Between the months of April and May, Nevada Outdoor School put on our largest field trip to date! We hosted 761 students between 38 teachers and 4 counties, our Watershed Heroes Field Trip for 2nd graders! During this field trip experience, students learn about how they all live in a watershed and ways to respect and protect it while also using it!
We begin our field trip off with a skit hosted by our friends Thunder and Lightning! They engage the students by asking questions about their local watershed and where it is located. Once someone guesses the name of our local watershed (The Humboldt River Basin) a special guest, Watershed Hero *superhero pose* joins in on the fun as well! Then, one lucky student gets to come up and join in a game of Race to the Humboldt! Where that student shows the rest of the school how water moves from a high point (Mountains) down to a low point (our very own Humboldt River!)
Once we end the opening skit, students break up by class into one of our four hands on stations where they learned about identifying towns along the Humboldt River, how different plants and animals impact the quality and quantity of the water, act out the water cycle through a boogie, and locate the different parts of our watershed on a map!
One station is “Sum of its Parts” where students identify towns located along the Humboldt River and demonstrate how negative impacts accumulate and move downstream. Students then model how a Watershed Hero plays an active role in preventing or reducing negative impacts by analyzing their actions, evaluating their impacts, and choosing wisely to positively impact their watershed.
Another station known as “Water Quality and Quantity: Who Feels the Impact?” is allowing students to “turn into” a variety of plants and animals that are in our local watershed. Through different games and activities, they evaluate how those plants, animals, and even people are impacted by the quality and quantity of water in a watershed. Students are then challenged to analyze how their actions can impact their watershed and generate ideas for how they can choose wisely to lessen negative impacts when possible.
A third station is “Water on the Move”. This station really gets the students moving when they act out the water cycle and connect the movement of water in the water cycle to how water moves in a watershed through a boogie! Students then use a watershed model to identify different parts of a watershed, geographical features and how water moves in a watershed. Using the watershed model, students predict, observe and discuss how water moves. They identify places where pollution might occur and observe how the movement of water, driven by the water cycle, carries that pollution through the watershed, negatively impacting the water quality. Evaluating the causes and impacts of pollution, students generate ideas of how they can help lessen negative impacts on their local watershed as watershed heroes.
Finally, our fourth station is “Seeing Watersheds” where students locate parts of a watershed on a map while learning about what makes the Humboldt River Basin Watershed unique! They then create a kinesthetic model to demonstrate how water flows within a watershed while investigating how negative impacts can also move through the watershed. Students evaluate how they can help lessen negative impacts on their watershed by choosing wisely as a watershed hero.
We conclude our field trip by bringing all the 2nd-grade classes together and having the Watershed Hero lead the group in the Water Cycle boogie one last time and to officially have them become Watershed Heroes *superhero pose*! Each student gets a watershed hero bracelet and a water droplet where they are asked “How can you become a watershed hero?” that they take back to their class and draw, write, and create what they learned from the field trip.
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