Great Lakes Great Stewards

Great Lakes Great Stewards

Curriculum links

Society and Environment (Place and Space, Investigations)

English (Reading, Speaking and Listening)

Specific outcomes: Students will learn that:

• natural features and built features combine to form a landscape

• natural and human processes can create/change particular landscapes

• different locations contain specific features, which can be used to describe or distinguish them

• processes affect the natural and built features of places

• the landscape provides natural resources which people use

• people’s activities have planned and unplanned impacts on the natural features of a landscape

• the features of places influence human activity and people’s views on which places need to be cared for

• the impact of one group of people on a particular landscape or environment may affect other people and may cause conflict over its use

• change impacts on people, lifestyles and ideas and can be for better or worse

• decisions made now about the care of particular landscapes/environments (sustainability) will affect people’s well-being in the future, and

• there are actions that form part of the democratic decision making process (such as meeting procedures, reflection cycles, respecting other’s points of view and accepting majority vote).

Students will also learn to:

• interpret maps and visual information and make meaningful evaluations from the data, and

• research, record information, interpret and synthesize information and present findings appropriately.

Students will also cooperate in groups to:

• discuss and reach consensus about the topic, and

• construct mind map/s specific to their watershed or sub-watershed.

Activities

These activities are best done for a local subwatershed (such as the one in which the school is located).

1A. Introductory Activity

Preparation

Teachers should become familiar with the watershed being studied by reading background material or driving around the main areas and noting land use

Lesson

As an introduction to the study of your local watershed have students, in groups or as a class, construct a mind map about all the features of the local watershed to be studied. Cover these points before they start:

1. A watershed is the area of land from which water will drain down to a certain point. Which direction the water will flow is determined by the geography of the land. As water falls to earth it will either flow along the surface or underground towards the lowest point – that is, water travels ‘downhill’.

2. Watersheds can cover a whole basin, for example the Pennsylvania Lake Erie Watershed includesall the land and tributaries that drain into Lake Erie. Watersheds can be divided into smaller sub-watersheds, based on a tributary. For example the Presque Isle Baywatershed includes all the water that flows into Presque Isle Bay, whicheventually flows intoLake Erie.

• Decide which watershed is to be the focus of study.

• You may wish to conduct a brainstorm on what students know about this area.

• Ask students to construct a mind map on this watershed (this could be done in groups or as a class discussion). A sample mind map for Walnut Creek is supplied with these sub-headings: • landforms, geology, soils • landuse • history • coast • rivers, creeks, wetlands • vegetation • fauna

• Following the brainstorm/mind mapping activity, students should complete a KWHL chart. (Four columns: what I KNOW, WHAT I need to know, HOW I will find out,WHAT I have LEARNED. The final column is completed as the unit progresses or as part of an assessment at the end of the unit.

1B. INTRODUCTORY ACTIVITY - DEFINING THE WATERSHED AREA

Preparation

Students will require individual copies of a contour map of the area being studied

Lesson

• To enable students to understand how the features of their local landscape are related to the drainage and collection of rainwater, each student will need a contour map of the area showing streams, rivers and drains and colored pencils. (If you have trouble obtaining or interpreting your maps, contact your local watershed group, water authority, or local government environmental officer or agriculture department near you).

• Have students focus on the general area of the watershed in question and locate on their maps any waterways (streams, creeks, swamps, drains, channels) and shade them in.

• Ask students to trace them back upstream to see if any other smaller water bodies flow into them and to trace them downstream to see where they go.

• Students locate the boundaries of the watershed that contributes run-off to the water body/bodies being studied. These boundaries are usually ridges of higher ground.

• Using a thick line, students draw in the watershed (around the boundaries). This is the starting point from which water flows in your area.

• They now add small arrows to their maps to show the direction of the water flow in the area.

Preparation

Familiarize yourself with the watershed to be studied if necessary by background reading or driving the main areas of the local watershed and noting land uses. The case study information provided contains information on the Presque Isle Baywatershed and indicates the type of information that is useful for this study. Such information is often available from PA Sea Grant or the Erie County Conservation District.

1C. INTRODUCTORY ACTIVITY - LANDUSE

Preparation

Lesson

• As a class or in groups, students brainstorm the land uses in their local catchment.

• Make a list of different land uses. This could be under headings such as rural, residential, commercial, for example.

• For each item on the list, consider what changes were made to the natural environment to accommodate this land use. Consider the accompanying changes also such as roads or power.

• Google Earth could be used to help students identify land uses and associated changes to the natural environment.

1D. INTRODUCTORY ACTIVITY - Watershed MODEL

Preparation

A 3D landscape model can be borrowed from Environment Erie or the Conservation District. The model sits on a tabletop and comes complete with props and a lesson plan.

Contact information:

Environment Erie

Tom Ridge Environmental Center•301 Peninsula Drive, Suite 5•Erie, PA 16505
814.835.8069

Erie County Conservation District

1927 Wager Road • Erie, PA 16509 • Phone (814) 825-6403

Lesson

Materials and guidelines are provided with the model to demonstrate the role of natural features, changes created by human activity, movement of water in the catchment, groundwater and the effects of pollution as it moves downstream.

Discuss with the students the implications of the demonstrations and encourage the students to identify which groups could be targeted to change behaviors and what remedies could be applied.

2. PHOTO INTERPRETATIONS

Preparation

Ensure students have access to cameras to take land use photos or alternatively prepare a computer power point or smart board set of the photos provided for the case study watershed and any others available from the web. Familiarize yourself with question types included on the worksheet, or copy sufficient worksheets (Worksheet L1) if alternative activity is being used.

Lesson

Option 1: Your own watershed

Have students take photographs of as many as the land uses from your list (in Activity 1C.) as possible. Group members can share this task, or it could be an activity undertaken on a watershed tour excursion.

As a group, students study their photos and select six to work with. For each photo they write a series of questions related to the land use and what effect it may have on the wetlands in the watershed (four – six questions requiring answers of different types – example, observation, interpretation, hypothesis, value judgments). Each member of the group should then research and answer the questions from at least two of the land use cards.

Option 2: Presque Isle Baywatershed

Worksheet L1 contains photographs of land uses in the Presque Isle Baywatershed area of the Lake Erie. Students should observe each photo carefully to identify all the elements of land use and change that are evident. Ask students to think about the possible consequences these might have for the nearby tributary, Presque Isle Bay and Lake Erie.

Answer the specific questions on each page.

3. DRAW AN ANNOTATED PHOTOSKETCH

Part A.

Preparation

• Blackboard or copy instructions below or provide students with a copy of Worksheet L2.

• Ensure access to photos from Worksheet L1.

Lesson

Part A

Students each choose one of the watershed photos (refer to Worksheet L1 in Option 2 above) and follow these instructions (also contained in Worksheet L2):

• Draw a grid (3 squares x 3 squares) within a frame the same size as the picture or to scale with the grid drawn on a larger or smaller picture.

• In light pencil mark your grid to show foreground, background and middle ground and left and right of centre.

• Using the construction frame as a guide, quickly and lightly sketch a rough outline of the main features of your selected photo.

• Still with pencil (errors can be erased), use lines (shading and texture) to fill in the details you wish to highlight (e.g. the main physical and built features, such as skyline, foreground, natural vegetation, major geographical features of the landscape like beach or hills or built feature such as highways or buildings). Note: this is a sketch, not a perfect copy.

• Label the features you have drawn (print labels horizontally).

• Give the sketch a title.

Part B

4. JIGSAW ACTIVITY. (AGRICULTURE, URBAN DEVELOPMENT, RECREATION, TRANSPORT, INDUSTRY)

Students research the place or feature they chose and write a 200-word description, which includes the location of the photograph, a description of the natural and human features, a brief explanation of the human impacts/changes, which have occurred, and the reason they chose the photo.

Preparation

• Students form groups of five.

• Each group member is allocated one of the following land uses on which to become ‘expert’:

o Agriculture

o Urban development

o Recreation

o Transport

o Industry.

Lesson

• Students move into ‘expert’ groups to gather and share information about their specialist area and how it impacts on the natural environment in general and the local waterway in particular. These groups also locate examples of where or how a specific problem exists within the watershed being studied, and what is or could be done to reduce the problem.

• Each member of the expert group records the information gathered and then returns to their home group to explain their findings and listen to the findings of the other experts.

• At the conclusion of the expert discussions, each member of the home group should complete a brief summary of the main findings of each expert under the headings (Facts/ Examples/ Solutions.).

• Home groups should then discuss:

a) The findings as a whole to reach a group consensus as to which activity poses the major threat currently in the watershed being studied.

b) The methods available to minimize this threat.

c) The extent to which this may be a further threat in the future.

d) The impact future/increased activity of this sort will have.

• Home groups then share these findings with the class.

• As a whole, the class discusses what measures the students personally are able to perform or influence to minimize the threats identified.

5. ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP

Students, in groups, as a whole class or individually, decide on an action or measure as discussed in Activity 4 that they could personally perform or undertake, and design a strategy/campaign to influence their peers/the whole school/the community to join in the effort to protect the watershed.

Note: this could be used as an assessment task. A sample rubric is included in the assessment tasks in this module and should be modified to suit the levels within the class and the specific aspects of the task being assessed.

Students could be encouraged to make a personal pledge. These could be displayed or published and revisited in one or two months to evaluate how successful the individual was at applying the principles learned and implementing the pledge made. A general discussion of the barriers, difficulties and reasons for varying degrees of success and failure should follow.

6. WATERSHED HEALTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: READING AND DISCUSSION

Preparation

Provide students with Worksheet L3 based on the West Australian newspaper article ‘Farmers split in their role over river health’.

Lesson

1. Introduce the topic by asking students what they can tell you about sustainable development. It is defined by the United Nations as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Generally it is considered to have three components:

• healthy ecosystems

• social well-being and cohesion

• a prosperous economy.

Also ask them what they understand by the concept ‘watershed health’?

Ask them to think about watershed health from the point of view of sustainable development. Look at Question 1 and conduct a brainstorm (individually, in groups or as a class) on how river health can be considered an environmental issue, an economic issue and a social issue.

3. Students then read the article and answer the questions, which follow. Some points that could be added to the mind map after reading are (based on text and some possible consequences)

Social / Economic / Environmental
• Productive farms are good for rural communities
• Some people choose hobby farms as a lifestyle – they may not be following best practice
• Many home gardeners want ‘healthy’ gardens and lawns.
• Healthy rivers are important for recreation.
• Is a ban the answer? / • Poor quality soils need fertilizer to be productive.
• Banning some fertilizers would create difficulties for farmers.
• Healthy rivers are important for economic activity on/around the river – e.g. fishing, tourism, real estate.
• The cost of fixing problems can be very expensive. / • River health has declined due to too much Nitrogen and Phosphorus entering the river from farms; sewage; hobby farms and home gardens.
• Low soluble fertilizers are advocated by ‘green’ groups.
• Fertilizer entering rivers leads to algal blooms and fish deaths.

4. Conduct a class discussion or debate on the topic: the Government should introduce laws forcing farmers to use low-soluble fertilizers