Riverbend trip

Friday was our last field trip, which was to Riverbend Environmental Center. Riverbend sits at the Western edge of "Conshohocken Curve" above the Schuylkill River. Saw Mill Run is the stream that runs along the edge of the center. From the parking lot you cross the stream and climb a hill to a big red barn that smells of old pine. Inside, terrariums filled with turtles, snakes, and insects line the walls. We gathered there for a short introduction before being split into two groups to rotate throughout the activities.

We climbed farther up the steep hill to the ridge where Riverbend's "Lenape Camp" is found. The Lenape Indians once used the land around Riverbend as a summer camp due to its ideal fishing site along the river and its wealth of forest plants and animals. Our group started with "Gifts of a Deer". Guide Vanessa, told us the Lenape never wasted a single part of the deer they hunted, for its life was a great gift to the Indians. She passed around various deer bones and asked us to guess the part and what it might have been used for. The items included  a scapula, a lower jaw bone with molars, an antler, a furry tail hide, and a foreleg. Then she shared some tools made from each of the parts. The flat triangular scapula was lashed to a tree branch to be used as a hoe, and the antler was lashed to another branch for use as a rake. The molars on the jaw bone would have been used to husk corn kernels. The soft fur had many uses for clothing and comfort. The foreleg may have been used as a tool handle, but more importantly, the sinew from the tendons was used as a strong thread or rope for connecting and lashing tool parts.

We then moved on to "Gardening and Foraging". Vanessa said the Lenape did not do a lot of agriculture because they travelled from camp to camp following the seasons. However, they did plant "the three sisters": corn, squash, and beans for their complementary nutrients and their multiple uses as food and tools. She told us "foraging" meant searching and finding food from nature, and explained how the Lenape found many medicinal and edible plants in the forest. In a grove, Vanessa sent the children out to find various plants, each labeled with a card showing pictures of full growth and an explanation of use. It was interesting to see how the students scanned for content rather than read the entire description, but their scanning did not always provide them sufficient information.

Next we experienced "Home and Hearth", consisting of a child-size model of a Lenape longhouse covered in reed mats, a fire ring and tripod. The children trooped inside the longhouse and sat on furs and reed mats.

Vanessa showed many items typical of Lenape life, including soft leather loincloths,skirts, and shirts, embroidered moccasins, corn husk dolls, a baby doll on a cradle board, and various musical instruments. The children got to handle and try out all of the items. (unfortunately our first, originally working video camera froze up at this point!)

Moving on we learned about "Hunting and Fishing". We had already learned deer were one of the animals hunted by the Lenape, but Vanessa showed us the furs of many other animals of the forest, including bear, beaver, coyote, squirrel, fox, and rabbit (the softest!). She also showed us a picture of the Lenape's favorite fish to catch: a 12 foot long sturgeon that could feed an entire village for days. Sturgeon are no longer swimming in the Schuylkill, nearly fished to extinction and forced from their habitat, but some still swim in the Delaware (As my husband who works on the Delaware Riverside can attest!).



that's how long  a sturgeon was

 We concluded our Lenape lesson and went back to the barn for lunch. Afterward we switched guides and began our afternoon lesson on watersheds and healthy streams. Roxanne brought us out to see a working model of a watershed, which included a ridge, slope, tributary, and river, as well as community features such as farms, houses, and factories.

To explain a watershed she had two children stand beside each other with their hands meeting in a "V". The heads of "Mount Daniella and Mount Angelica" became the ridges, and their arms sloped down into a valley with a stream rushing between them. A watershed or drainage basin collects all the rainwater that falls between the two ridges. Gathered around the model, Roxanne talked about some of the pollutants that occur within a watershed. She used chocolate sprinkles to represent animal droppings on farms and in pet-owners yards, sea salt to represent our salted winter roads, green water to represent oil and antifreeze leakage that occurs on our roads from our cars, pink water to represent chemicals used as pesticides, herbicides, and factory chemical waste, and cocoa powder to represent loose dirt in fields and deforested land. Once the model was "polluted", each of the children had a chance to make it "rain" with a water spray bottle over the watershed model. Very quickly we heard cries of "Oh no!!!" and "Ewww!" as the rain water dripped down the slope washing all of the pollutants into the river in a brown icky mess.

Roxanne then asked us to think of ways we could prevent pollutants from entering our watersheds. I told the students we would be making our own river model in the near future and that they should observe some of the features that they might want to include in their own.

since the videocam failed, I whipped out my sketchbook and watercolors

It was time to try our next station, which looked at the health of streams based on the aquatic and insect life that could be found in a water sample. We split into three groups and were provided a poster showing three levels of stream health with pictures of animals found in each as well as a set of laminated insect cards to sort and match on the poster. Group 1 streams have no pollution and are in green sites like parks and wilderness with lots of trees, falling leaves that provide nutrients, shady banks that keep the water cool, and strong root systems along banks to prevent erosion. Group 2 streams have a fair amount of pollution and are in yellow sites like farmland or suburbia that have deforested land, warmer water temperatures, and fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide runoff. Group 3 streams have a lot of pollution and are in blue sites like cities with no plantlife along concrete riverbanks, many buildings, and factory, trash, and oil runoff.

Our final station was a search for macroinvertebrates in the actual stream. Armed with small cups and instructions to turn over rocks in the water, the kids examined the stream. Unfortunately, we found very little, but were told that was because it was getting too cold out for insects and the rain the night before had washed much of the insect life downstream.

This was a remarkable hands-on experience for our third-graders. There was a lot of information to take in, but it complemented our learning objectives for this project perfectly. Back at school the kids finished painting a river scene to accompany their writing assignment summarizing the previous week's field trip. I helped Cindy mount their pictures and writing samples on black paper to hang in the hall. Their writing has improved dramatically from the first samples I viewed!