Outdoor education course activates 5th-graders' senses

Zach, Emerson and 58 other students from TOPS K-8 school were clustered along the banks of Thornton Creek on a raw, gray day, exploring a stretch of the salmon stream flowing between Meadowbrook Community Center and Nathan Hale High School.


		Joshua Trujillo / P-I
	From left, TOPS students Henry Luke, 10, Shanize Hall, 11, and Hiroko Nakahara, 11, with clipboard, check a measurement that shows the degree of the water's turbidity in Thornton Creek near Nathan Hale High School in Seattle.

Their field trip ties into the "land and water" science unit taught in fifth grade in the Seattle Public Schools, and it's set up by the Homewaters Project, a non-profit venture organized 10 years ago by enterprising teachers in North Seattle.

The students recorded what they saw, heard and smelled. They unreeled a tape measure alongside the channel and then tossed sticks into the water from a footbridge, calculating the rate of flow with the aid of a stopwatch. They stuck little flags in the muddy shore to mark runs of fast and slow water and spots where the stream had cut away the land or deposited stones and debris.

They told Homewaters coordinator Linda Versage what they had learned already in their classrooms:

"Water flows downhill."

"Water erodes things."

"Water helps plants."

"Water flows the easiest way it can."

They expanded their vocabularies: The word for the day, Homewaters volunteer guide Thea Marshall said, was turbidity, or cloudiness.

Pouring creek water into a tall plastic tube a couple of inches across, the students stopped when they could no longer read lettering on the bottom of the tube by peering through the water, noting the level in something called nephelometric turbidity units.

They also stamped their legs and waved their arms to keep warm. And they hustled to the public gym nearby to eat their brown-bag lunches.

"I liked the part where we got to learn science," Mia Montagna said between bites. "I found out that salmon need the water to be clear, and also they need to be able to breathe."

Derek Pierce enjoyed dropping the sticks in the stream and working the stopwatch.

"I learned more about the water and how streams go," he said.

Isabella Fabens found a lot to recommend the field trip.

"I like the nature part of it," she said. "I like how you get to test the water and see if it's cloudy or not. I learned that salmon need to have a certain speed of water to have it be healthy for them."

The expedition was an improvement over the lessons in the classroom, taught with tap water and dirt in plastic tubs, Isabella said.

"I like to know how it really is, and how it happens in real life."

Homewaters started 10 years ago as the Thornton Creek Project, the brainchild of a group of teachers interested in new ways to explain connections between people and their environment. It focused on educating students in schools in the Thornton Creek watershed in northeast Seattle.

The program has since expanded to include other watersheds and schools across the city, and last year the name was changed to Homewaters.

More than 1,200 students in more than 30 schools will participate in creek field trips, community mapping projects, water-saving gardening experiments and history studies under the Homewaters umbrella in the 2003-04 school year.

Seattle Public Utilities underwrites the costs of the schools program, including bus transportation and payment for the parks department naturalists who guide students in Carkeek and Seward parks, and at Camp Long.

The Thornton Creek outing fit well with the land and water instruction in her classroom, TOPS fifth-grade teacher Jill Reifschneider said after the field trip.

"We've been, for weeks now, doing water and dirt in tubs," she said. "I thought it was crucial to have that connection to the real world. It actually clicked for some kids that it hadn't clicked for yet.

"We've spurred their interest and curiosity."

For more information about the Homewaters program, visit www.homewatersproject.org

P-I reporter Gregory Roberts can be reached at 206-448-8022 or gregoryroberts@seattlepi.com

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