Grant #293

Watershed Education Initiative

Project Description:

Sierra Nevada Journeys (SNJ) proposes an innovative, culturally relevant program for Washoe County area youth, including a comprehensive approach to watershed education through the Watershed Education Initiative (WEI). Thanks to the generous and ongoing support of the Truckee River Fund, the WEI has been a component of our programming since 2011.

WEI is a dynamic education program intentionally designed to build an understanding of student’s local watershed, including human impacts on the watershed, water quality, and issues surrounding watershed protection. The program occurs over several sessions. After a brief orientation, our educators go into classrooms and teach two lessons. Each lesson fosters students’ interest in science by using hands-on activities like creating a watershed model.

In Summary, the Watershed Education Initiative includes:

  • The school-based component includes two in-class lessons (three) hours of in-class instruction. Students participate in hands-on lessons incorporating the Truckee River watershed, point and non-point source pollution, invasive species, sources and impacts of erosion, water conservation, and stewardship.
  • The field-based component includes one day of outdoor science education as students hike along the Truckee River Watershed. Students seek clues about the health of the watershed and determine water quality by collecting and identifying macro-invertebrates or conducting chemical tests such as pH, dissolved oxygen, or turbidity. Students use evidence to draw conclusions about the health of the Truckee River Watershed.
  • SNJ provides five ready-to-use classroom extension lessons for teachers that help students prepare for and review learning objectives, as well as extend and reinforce each SNJ-directed lesson.
  • To encourage family engagement, SNJ provides teachers with a template to email parents with a summary and pictures of their child’s experience after each unit, along with information for family-based discussion of the curriculum
  • The volunteer component of the program builds our capacity to involve the local community and broadens accessibility to our programming for low-income schools by helping to keep costs low.

TMWA Benefit:

WEI is an education program that addresses water, water quality and watershed protection for K-8th grade students, directly aligning with grant priority VI: Stewardship and Environmental Awareness. Students gain first-hand experience determining water quality, explore human impacts on their water source, and obtain skills, knowledge and a field experience to connect them to their local river. The overall long-term program impacts include:

  • Students understand important science concepts related to the Truckee River watershed and can articulate how their actions affect the Truckee River watershed and local ecosystems.
  • Teachers use extension lessons and implement more hands-on exploration of the watershed. Parents and community members engage in watershed education directly through WEI volunteer opportunities.
  • Health of the Truckee River watershed and local ecosystems improves as students and their families adopt environmental stewardship practices that help reduce water pollution and human impacts.