Children's Clean Water Festival

A group of Tillamook County fourth graders arrive at the exhibit hall for the Clean Water Festival.

The Tillamook Children's Clean Water Festival is an annual watershed education event for fourth grade students and their teachers. Designed to complement existing science education efforts in the classroom, and coordinated by the TEP, the Festival brings numerous environmental educators to the Twin Rocks Friends Camp each spring for a day of hands on learning about that most precious natural resource - water.

The camp comes alive early in the morning as dozens of volunteers and educators prepare for 300 plus students - public, private and home school - to appear in school buses and cars, accompanied by their teachers and parent chaperones. Upon arriving, each class is greeted by a friendly volunteer guide who leads them through a series of rotating presentations and exhibits. While one class goes on an Incredible Journey, "becoming" individual water droplets who travel through a complex life cycle, another group may take a walk to a nearby wetland where they'll get up close and personal with aquatic insects and plants. Other students will be gathered around live pelicans, seeing first hand how garbage in the marine environment adversely affects the wildlife that lives there. More presentations open students' eyes to the fascinating web of life in a mud flat, or give them a chance to giggle as they watch a classmate be transformed into a water bird with lots of silly props that illustrate avian adaptations.

A "Camp Champ" learns about low-impact camping and leave-no-trace ethics.

At any given time throughout the day, thirty to fifty students will be roaming the huge Exhibit Hall, filled with more exciting things to see, touch, and do. At one table, students learn how much of their own bodies are made of water; at another they watch live oysters and clams filter water and find out how important these tasty bivalves are to the water quality in our estuaries; at the next table they'll discover which household products can be harmful to the environment if not properly used, and across the hall others make their own ocean waves.

It all adds up to a day rich in tangible learning, enhanced by good clean fun. But the day doesn't stand alone. During the months prior to the festival, the Festival Coordinator visits each fourth grade class and leads an activity using recognized natural resource curricula such as Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife's Stream Scene, Project WET, Project WILD Aquatic, Oregon State University Extension's 4-H Wetland Wonders, EPA's Teacher's Curriculum, and Oregon Trout's Salmon Watch Curriculum. These visits provide students with background information about water quality and show teachers how easy it is to incorporate water education into their existing curriculum.

Using much of the same curricula, the TEP has created eleven water education study kits that teachers can check out for free from the TEP office. Each of these kits contain numerous hands-on activities with their associated props, field equipment, lesson plans, and exceptional children's literature on water resources, and are available to all K-12 educators.

The Tillamook Children's Clean Water Festival is an exciting and informative outreach and education event that creates no extra work for teachers and districts while supplementing existing science education. It also provides educators with intriguing new ways to integrate science with other academic subjects. By serving as partners in education with the schools, the TEP has been pleased to receive 100% commitment from all teachers to attend the festival each year.

Outdoor School

A group of Tillamook County sixth graders at outdoor school collects water samples from a stream to test for dissolved oxygen and pH levels.
Click photo to enlarge

In response to the annual success of the festival, organizers of Tillamook County Outdoor School asked TEP to lead a water quality unit that all sixth graders now participate in each year. This 90-minute outdoor class builds upon the work of the Clean Water Festival by giving students the tools they and their families need to be pro-active citizens that help meet the target goal of 2010 as outlined in DEQ's TMDL and Water Quality Management Plan for the Tillamook Bay watershed.