Trip to RiverBend Environmental Center

This trip ( our last trip) gave the students exposure to the concept of 'tributaries' which "contribute" to rivers. It also gave them a close-up look at living things that grow and live by streams and rivers. The first lesson set involved an immersion in the culture of the Lenape Indians. We will use this as a basis for a Compare/Contrast writing. The second lesson set was the concept of a "watershed". They use a scale model of a community, they use everyday pollutants in a manner the children understood, they let the students create "rain" and the students observed the pollutants enter the stream through runoff from the land. This reinforced the concepts of "mouth" of the river as they watched the stream/river drain into what would have been a larger body of water. The larger body of water was represented by a "drain". Fortunately, we had a reading activity (again focused on Main Idea/Details) about Rivers, and the terms drainage basin, mouth, source, and others were in the passage. The students were delighted to see the model of the Watershed, and to see that it had an actual DRAIN! Talk about an AHA! moment!