Programs

While some neighborhoods look great, others are covered in snow, and people are trying to get it out of the way quick before it gets too cold.

With mounds of snow and icy roads, schools don't want to risk their students coming to class.

The 13th annual Clinton River Water Festival felt the blow of severe weather as Metro Detroit experienced a large number of snowstorms this past winter.

Trying to clear it or also trying to figure out whether or not kids should be in school tomorrow.

Because of the winter weather, schools all across Metro Detroit are already running out of snow days, and that could change the way your child's calendar shapes up.

As a result of the numerous school closings, more than 250 fifth grade students in the Clinton River Watershed School District were unable to attend the festival this year. According to Kathleen Gray of the Detroit Free Press, the 2018-2019 school year proved to be a brutal reminder that Michigan's winters are unpredictable. However, on May 19th, 2019, over 850 students came to this extraordinary festival and experienced an array of indoor and outdoor presentations that taught the importance of water and the impact it has on our environment, complementing the science curriculum taught at the fifth-grader schools.

Water festival.

Here is a look of what some of those presentations looked like.

Just drawing from this water over here, and if something got into the water into the ground and contaminated it, then you would have some of that material come up in your drinking.

This is [inaudible] of the skull is they are like us and that they have enamel on their teeth which will [inaudible]

[inaudible] and you can see she's sticking out.

Does anybody have any guesses? How can you tell a male [inaudible] ?

We're learning about the Clinton River and then how to keep the water clean and everything and how it affects the animals. If there's pollution in the water, different chemicals, just how that can deform the animal?

So if you do decide to look for salamanders it is important

We've been learning about how the plant help the soil and how everything runs off. We have a very big supply of water and we need to take care of it or else it won't be as great because we won't be able to drink it without having a bunch of chemicals.

A life jacket, great name because that's exactly what it does. So he does that, and what happened? He went this way, and the life jacket went this way.

We're learning about soil, birds, worms, bugs, trees, electricity, and that's what we came to do today.

For many of the teachers, they have experienced the festival multiple times. Based on their survey responses, the Clinton River Water Festival has and is bringing valuable information about water and the environment to their students.

We've been coming here for the last four years and it's a really great way for them to make connections with what they're learning about science at school, to real-world challenges that exist today.

We came last year for the first time and I felt like it was a really excellent opportunity for the kids to do learning outside of the classroom. There are several different ways that it ties right into our curriculum.

So I have been coming here the last couple of years and pretty much it was an extension from what we've talked about in class, and it's more hands-on. They actually get to see and take a look and get a different point of view for what I've been telling them in class.

The festival continues to celebrate the dedicated work of the fifth graders that express their excitement and concerns by participating in the annual poster contest. This year, the five posters selected were outstanding as ever and brought to light the student's perspectives on the importance of this resource.

I've put five ways to save water because I believe that saving water is important.

Well, you can save water by a lot of things and to prevent pollution. Like picking up after your dog can save water by turning off the water while you are actually brushing, and you can take shorter showers. When you're done with your water, you can pour it in a plant to save them.

Well, you can take shorter showers and try not to flush the toilet if not needed, and make sure your trash goes where it's supposed to.

The water gets polluted by people like us.

There's only so much water in the world.

Whatever the other sources that end water, we can't live.

Helping to make the festival successful year after year is the committed and dedicated efforts of the professionals that share their expertise and knowledge of the importance of our most valuable resource, water.

I've come here for around eight years and I really enjoy coming here. I get to interact with some awesome fifth graders. Our goal is to hope that kids will get a greater appreciation of wetlands, the wetlands that they see every day, and maybe look at them as a little more special and maybe something that they should care about.

Basically, we're teaching them about the groundwater model and the water cycle and how everything is interconnected. Everything that they essentially can have a potential of doing on the ground affects everything else and affects other people.

We're talking about Michigan lake sturgeon. So we are going to be doing a game that represents the life cycle of a lake surgeon from all the way from the egg until the adult stage. I'm from Detroit, so I grew up in the city.

There's lots of different things that you don't really encounter when you live in the city, lots of building, lots of concrete. You'll really get a chance to understand how much water is in Michigan, and why it's super important. So coming to places like this might be a kid's first experience in understanding why we have all this water, and why it's important, and why we need to conserve it.

Any chance I have to get to talk to kids at that age to maybe hook them back in, and maybe get them thinking science would be cool or some nature career or something.

If you can start them off at an early age and continue having them think about things that would affect them on a day-to-day basis, can effect what they do could affect other people, it goes a long way. The planning committee would like to thank the students and teachers that attended the Clinton River Water Festival at Oakland University.

Additionally, thanks are due to the remarkable time and efforts of all the people behind the scenes who are tirelessly year after year to make this Oakland University event a great success.