CEE doctoral students Rachel Scholes, Emily Marron, Daniel Ocasio, Scott Miller, Hannah Greenwald and postdoctoral researcher Chris Olivares go into elementary school classrooms once a month with a lesson plan on stormwater to excite local students about science and the environment.
The group is participating in Bay Area Scientists in Schools (BASIS).
The group created their own lesson plan based on their research, tracking storm water, how rain falls in the city, picking up contaminants on the way to collection drains, and how it is treated to become usable.
Using containers with “dirty” water (using food coloring, glitter, sand and larger materials to make it more visual), the scientists teach about water quality, different methods for filtering and evaluating water, formulating hypotheses, and testing to prove their hypotheses.
Read full story at It's Elementary: Grad Students Head to Local Schools in the Name of Science (by Amanda Cairo, Berkeley Water Center)