Sanders County Water Festival

On Tuesday, October 9^th I tagged along with Kitty to help out with the Sanders County Water Festival. As we drove Highway 200 from the National Bison Range to Thompson Falls Kitty let me know that we would spend the day with students from each town we passed: Dixon, Plains, Paradise.  By the end of the festival we had used the Enviroscape, a watershed model, to educate most of the fifth graders from a 100-mile stretch of the Clark Fork. Students learned about point and non-point sources of pollution and different contributors to pollution in a watershed including farms, sub-divisions, factories and forests. We all worked together to dream up pollution simulations and brainstorm solutions to mitigate damage to the watershed.

Check out this Sanders County video from 2011!

The WEN Enviroscape was one of a series of stations through which students explored their watershed. Representatives from Fish and Wildlife used games to teach about fish life cycles, forest service personnel provided hands on training in tree identification, and local consultants taught some traditional crafts built from the riparian environment. At the end of the day I couldn’t help but think it doesn’t just take a village to teach a child, it takes the many villages within a beautiful watershed to teach children to be stewards of place. 
Jess Kindred
Volunteer