Forest Lake Christian School Eighth Grade Program
The past two weeks Headwaters was in Auburn, CA working with the 8th grade at Forest Lake Christian School (FLCS) to learn about how water changes along the Sierra Watershed. Instructors brought water from the Truckee River, Santa Rosa, and Walnut Creek to FLCS for students to test to see how their school pond differed from water at the top and bottom of the watershed.
Some topics studied were changes in pollution, salinity, hardness, and pH across the various water samples. Students were surprised to learn that their pond was not as polluted as they thought after observing group 1 (pollution intolerant) macroinvertebrates living in the pond.
This Headwaters program, like all our programs, was centered around student driven research, and 94% of students felt that their group was in charge of their own project. Dissimilar to traditional middle school science labs, where students are told explicitly what to do, FLCS 8th graders took ownership of their experiments from conception to execution resulting in almost all of the students feeling that they were in charge of their project.
View the program photo album here!
