In September, a group of Lodi Unified teachers joined Kathy Grant, the City of Lodi’s Watershed Program Coordinator, and Brian Brown, California Project WET Coordinator, to learn more about the environmental science program.
The Project WET Foundation has taken on the mission of educating students about water, from sustainability to water issues around the world to local watersheds. They do this with a collection of hands-on, science-oriented lessons that teachers can use in the classroom.
Some of the lessons previewed at the recent workshop:
- Color Me a Watershed, where students create a map key and color in three maps representing changes in a watershed over time, to see how human settlement affects land use, wetlands, forests and more.
- Macroinvertebrate Mayhem, which assigns students various macroinvertebrates to learn about. Once they know how each macroinvertebrate lives and what stressors affect them, the students play a game of tag in a make-believe stream where the student who is “it” plays an environmental stressor and the others play macroinvertebrates.
- Blue River, in which students pass beads to simulate the movement of water down a river throughout the course of the year.
The lessons teach students about water, biology, geology and more, and better yet, they’re fun! Several of the Project WET lessons involve getting out of chairs and moving around, which makes science education more active — and helps more active students get it out of their systems while learning at the same time.
Those lessons and a bunch more are available in the Project WET Curriculum and Activity Guide 2.0, which also notes which Common Core standards each activity is correlated with.
For more information about Project WET, check out the Teach and Learn section of their website, call (406) 585-2236 or email info@projectwet.org.
For more information about environmental education in Lodi, call Kathy Grant at (209) 333-6800 ext. 2317 or email kgrant@lodi.gov.