Our field season has officially kicked off! We were so thrilled to host our first class field trips of the season last week! Two 4th grade classes from Robla Elementary and two 4th grade classes from Prairie Elementary came to Splash last Thursday (1/19/23) and Friday (1/20/23) for their vernal pool adventures!
The students have been studying the Splash curriculum, “Life in our Watershed – Investigating Vernal Pools,” in their classroom. They’ve been engaged with the fun, hands-on science lessons and each student has become the class expert on a vernal pool critter. On their field trip, many of these students got to meet their vernal pool critter in person, either in the field, in Splash’s Critterville room, or under a microscope! In class, they’ve even started raising fairy shrimp and gathering data on the population growth.
As much as the students LOVE doing the Splash lessons in class, the highlight of the program is when they come to Splash on their class field trip. Each class is split into three groups that rotate through three stations inside the Splash Center. They visit the microscope station where they peer through the scopes and identify live vernal pool invertebrates swimming in the well slides. They get to add pollutants to a watershed model and observe what happens when they make it rain. And they visit our live animal ambassadors in our Critterville room.
Then, each group gets to go into the field with their guide to explore the vernal pool grasslands. The students who visited Splash last week were great nature detectives and discovered evidence of pocket gophers digging in the grassland. They found coyote trails through the grass. They investigated vole holes, vole runs, and even found tiny vole scat at the entrance of one of the tunnels!
In the field, the ultimate destination is a vernal pool, with three platform stations, where the students can kneel down and use cups to scoop in the pool and see what critters they can find! The storms that swept through our region since the beginning of the year filled the vernal pools and they’re already teeming with tiny invertebrates. Despite the cold water and their numb hands, the students were giddy with excitement to have this magical opportunity!
It was “all hands on deck” for Splash staff, as we had our experienced, veteran guides leading the groups, while our new recruits shadowed them to learn how the trips work and how to engage the students in the field. The new guides soaked up the info to prepare themselves for leading these field trips on their own within a couple of weeks.
Splash will be conducting these field trips for a total of 100 4th and 5th grade classes between now and the end of April. Four down, 96 to go! Be on the lookout for more vernal pool field trip updates from Splash!