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Showing posts from August, 2020

The magic of civic ecology

I first felt the leap from learning to magic in 2015. At that time, I was working at the River Bend Nature Center and the nearby Cannon River STEM School . I was leading fourth graders along a river.  That year, one of my programs was working with the STEM school fourth graders teaching about water quality. Every day, I took a different group of three youth down to the Straight River to measure the turbidity of the water. We collected the data and sent it off to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency as part of the Citizen Water Monitoring program.  Together, the students and teachers decided to end the year with a Straight River Stewardship Day. On that day, I saw teams of fourth grade stewards working together to clean litter from the riverbanks. I watched watershed professionals lead groups of youth and adults to clean leaves and debris from stormwater catch basins. I heard fourth graders explain to parents how they do turbidity testing and where the data is sent. I appreciated tha