Water Days

Students celebrated Water Days at Northeast's Lifelong Learning Center. Students wrestled with the content, a raft of skills, and some pretty compelling experiments. It was fabulous! Water Days consists of four 30-minute classroom sessions featuring hands-on learning. Natural Resources District is the festival sponsor. 

One core session that is always among the students’ favorites is the water rocket launch. Water rockets are used to help students understand the principles of aeronautics. 

Two-Liter Pop Bottle Rockets may well be the greatest physical science teaching tool ever created! Middle grade students can manipulate and control variables and see their hypotheses verified or refuted.

In the “Edible Aquifer” session  students constructed model aquifers with cereal, ice cream, and pop. This activity was a fun and easy way to understand the geology of an aquifer. 

Huh? Coco Puffs equals bedrock?

And there’s the icky “Garbage-ology” activity that has students sort through garbage and make garbage pizza discs. “Boys tend to like it better than girls, I think,” Mrs. Miller, Keep Norfolk Beautiful, said with a laugh. “It’s very educational and a fun way to show kids what a landfill is.”

Students participated in a Jeopardy game which proved the Water Days festival  greatly improved participants’ water knowledge. Any session that gets children moving is popular and provides an opportunity to incorporate education. After all, education is the NRD's mission.

A big thanks to the middle school science teachers who organized and registered students for this field trip.