Water takes center stage as fourth-graders Make a Splash

Shields Elementary fourth-grader Brianna Porter thought for a second about her favorite activity at the Make a Splash festival April 5 before announcing it was the mosquito session.

“I liked learning about mosquitoes and all the viruses they have,” she said.

Shields Elementary students were part of more than 700 fourth-graders from seven elementary schools who attended the annual festival held this year at St. Jones Reserve near Kitts Hummock.

Students participated in 25 stations where they learned about the importance of water, the water cycle and how humans use water.

The stations were packed with hands-on activities that kept students engaged and interested. A water-cycle activity showed students how water moves through things like plants, clouds, soil, glaciers and oceans.

Environmental scientist Jennifer Luoma handed each student a bracelet with one bead, and depending on the bead's color, the students went to a bowl with same color beads representing a step in the water cycle. A roll of a die showed students where to go next.

Fourth-grader Allie Ferguson quickly rolled her die after taking a green bead from a bowl of beads representing plants. She then dashed off to find the white beads representing clouds – a gaseous state water takes as it is processed by plants and returns to the atmosphere.

“I don't have a lot of colors yet,” she said.

Luoma said some bracelets won't have a lot of colors because sometimes water moves through only a few states such as oceans to clouds and back to oceans as rain.

“When we wrap everything up, we explain why that happens,” Luoma said.

At one of the inside stations, fourth-graders Matt Catts and Aidan Block had about a minute to fill their plates with beans from a big bowl. Matt had no limit to what beans he could scoop as he loaded his plate with both black and white beans. Aidan, however, could only pick out white beans, and he ended up with only a few.

The black beans represented plastics that animals often digest in the wild; the smattering of white beans showed how few nutrients a wild animal would consume if it avoided toxic plastic pollution found in waterways.

Education coordinator Maggie Pletta said the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control has sponsored the event for 17 years in conjunction with volunteers from the Delaware Project WET, Delaware Division of Historical & Cultural Affairs' John Dickinson Plantation and Tidewater Utilities.

“It is our hope that providing the students with this opportunity will help them connect what they learned in the classroom to real life, and experiencing those connections will ignite a flame in them, making the next generation of Delaware's water resource stewards,” she said.

As she wrapped up the day's events, Pletta said it was another successful year.

“It was a little chilly today, but at least it was sunny,” she said. “I say it was a win.”