Imagine seeing a plastic cup in the mountains of eastern West Virginia fall into the beginning of the Potomac River. It’s easy to picture it sailing down river but it may be a little bit harder to imagine where it ends up. Perhaps as it is sailing down the river it meets more plastic cups that have fallen from different areas on the river. It’s possible that all the plastic cups could end up in the Chesapeake Bay in southern Virginia.
This cup’s trip through the Chesapeake Watershed can help explain the river as part of a drainage basin which is an extent or area of land where water from ice, rain and melting snow drains downhill into a body of water, such as a river, lake, reservoir, estuary, wetland, sea or ocean. The drainage basin is composed of streams, rivers and land surfaces that drain into those channels.
To understand that our physical environment is all connected can be a challenging idea. The Schoolyard Stewards program, directed by living Classrooms and Lands & Waters, in Washington, DC takes on this challenge by teaching children about watersheds and the environmetal impact of their actions.
Schools work within their own schoolyards, neighborhoods and the local watershed to learn about urban environmental stewardship while examining their own attitudes, behaviors, and actions. They seek solutions to environmental problems through restoration of native spaces and school gardens. They create their own school gardens with native plant species.
Parts of the Schoolyard Stewards program include in-class watershed education, shipboard watershed investigation, schoolyard greening projects, impervious surface reduction, community outreach, and other schoolyard based projects.
After learning about their surrounding watershed, indigenous plant species and ways to make their school yards green they all participate in a planting day. They have several different actions to take in planting day.
- Planting station - each student works closely with experts from Lands and Waters to plant a school garden with one to three native plant species.
- Erosion station - working in groups, students use models to watch erosion at work and see first hand how plants curb the loss of soil from the land.
- Awareness station - working in groups, students paint cloth banners with colorful pictures and messages about their garden. The banners are then hung on poles in the gardens. Along with display signs in the gardens, these banners announce to the community that the garden was planted by students at the school.
- Discovery station - students spend time digging in the soil, looking for earthworms, uncovering beetles and ants, examining roots, etc. A majority of the students enrolled in the schoolyard stewards program had never before been allowed to dig in the soil or hold an earthworm. This station allows students to get “down and dirty” in the garden.
The Schoolyard Steward program teaches children about environmental responsibility through school gardens with native plant species. It is an excellent example of different school gardens that can be created and different school garden curriculum that can be developed. For more information visit Schoolyard Stewards.
