During the months of April and May, Nevada Outdoor School put on their largest field trip of the year. Between 4 Nevada counties, 761 students and 38 teachers participated in the 2023 Watershed Heroes Field Trip for 2nd graders. Students learned about how they live in a watershed and ways to respect and protect their watershed while interacting with it!
The Watershed Field Trip consists of 4 hands-on stations where participants learn 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 an interactive dance, 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.
While at the “Water Quality and Quantity: Who Feels the Impact?” station, students learn how to identify a variety of plants and animals that are in our local watershed. They are then asked to evaluate how those plants, animals, and even people are impacted by the quality and quantity of water in a watershed. They 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.
At the “Water on the Move” station, participants act out the parts of the water cycle and connect the movement of water in the water cycle to how water moves in a watershed through the “Watershed Boogie”! Using this dance students are then able to identify different parts of a watershed, geographical features and how water moves in a watershed. 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 to 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 to their watershed by choosing wisely as a watershed hero.
By becoming watershed heroes during this field trip, students are then able to model how they play an active role in preventing or reducing negative impacts by analyzing their actions, evaluating their impacts, and choosing wisely to positively impact their watershed. At the end of the field trip students leave with a watershed hero bracelet and a water droplet. On the droplets participants are asked “How can you become a watershed hero?” Droplets are taken back to class where they draw, write, and create what they learned from the field trip.
This field trip could not happen without the help and funding from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP), AmeriCorps Nevada, Small Mine Development, Nevada Gold Mines, City of Elko, Elko and Humboldt County Commissioners and Silver Standard-Marigold. Thank you to all teachers signing their class up for this field trip! Interested in signing your class up for next year’s Watershed Heroes Field Trip? Email us at info@nevadaoutdoorschool.org. To learn more about Nevada Outdoor School visit our website at www.nevadaoutdoorschool.org.