Education Grant Recipient:
Burney Elementary School
Program: Our Watershed - A Living Classroom
Funding: $10,000
“Our Watershed - A Living Classroom” will increase teacher and student understanding and awareness of our local watershed and our place in the bigger picture of the Sacramento River watershed. Teachers and students will come to value our watershed as a
living classroom - a place to learn, explore, appreciate, and protect. A one-day teacher workshop will raise awareness and generate excitement for using our local watershed as the organizing structure and theme for teaching several academic standards.
An intensive pilot program focusing on Burney Elementary School fourth-grade classes will model how our local watershed can be used as a focus for teaching academic content. A Child's
Place in the Environment: Caring for Aquatic Systems, will form the curricular foundation for the traditional classroom education component. Three comparative field studies of local freshwater aquatic ecosystems will expand the walls of the classroom
into our local watershed. A Project Based Learning approach will be used to take students' knowledge, appreciation, and pride in our watershed to our community through an outdoor watershed mural and a working scale model of our local watershed. The mural
will depict the ecosystem and human interaction changes in our watershed from its source to the Pacific Ocean. The mural will be painted on a wall at Burney Elementary School. The working watershed model will be built in the school garden area. It will consist
of major mountains and waterways within our watershed. A native plant demonstration garden will be started in association with the watershed model.
This project will be a cooperative effort of many people from both the public and private sectors uniting administrators and teachers from the Fall River Joint Unified School District with the Forest Service, Spring Rivers Ecological Sciences, Burney Rotary
Club, local business people, and parents to bring “Our Watershed - A Living Classroom” to the children of the intermountain Area.
