October LCEER lessons make a splash!

October’s LCEER lessons really made a splash and our lessons for November are well on their way! Last month, K-6th grade students across 5 schools in Southern Humboldt and Northern Mendocino dove into the wonderful world of water as they explored ‘Rivers & Oceans’ with our Environmental Education Coordinator, Miss Taylor. Younger students created a mini kelp forest ecosystem in the classroom using streamers and added colored pictures to it after learning about the many creatures that call this special ecosystem off the coast of the King Range home.

Our middle group of students traveled around the classroom as water droplets and visited stations such as the Mattole River, clouds, Pacific Ocean, plants, and animals as they moved through the water cycle. They collect stamps from each station to keep track of their journeys and share them with the rest of the class to compare and contrast their paths at the end of the activity.

The older groups of students learned about riparian areas, stream heath, and water quality through playing “floodplain tag”. While holding beanbags which represent excess nutrients and sediments that could be harmful to stream health, students take on the role of raindrops as they run from one side of the playfield to the other, while students in the middle (representing riparian vegetation) try to tag them and make them drop their nutrients/sediments. If tagged, the students change from polluted raindrops to new trees that add to the riparian buffer zone. Students also learned about macroinvertebrates as bioindicators. These aquatic larvae can indicate high or low water quality due to their varying levels of sensitivity and tolerance and have many adaptations to help them survive their young life in the water. Our Lost Coast Environmental Education Resource (LCEER) lessons are available on our website, free for public use, www.lostcoast.org/lesson-matrix!