Sunday, June 8, 2014

Learning about water quality from a guest teacher

We were lucky enough to have two students from our high school's environmental science class come to teach us about water quality! They did a very cool, hands-on lesson where the students learned how to identify and count macroinvertebrates in the water, and use this data to determine if the water was "clean" or "dirty." This is some high level science learning for kindergarteners, but they were up to the task! Check out the pictures of these scientists hard at work.

First we took a look at the water samples and tallied the total number of leeches, worms, snails, mayfly larvae, and damselfly larvae.







Then we shared our results. We didn't find any damselflies, but lots of worms and leeches.



Our high school teacher taught us that this means that the water is very murky and dirty, which is not ideal for lots of organisms (including humans)!


Afterwards, we played a game matching pictures of adult and larva macroinvertebrates. Thanks to both of our high school scientists who came to teach us!



Then we even got to look at actual organisms!



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