Project WET and Project Aquatic Wild

On Saturday, September 30th, I attended a workshop called Project WET and Project Aquatic Wild. I really enjoyed it! Randy, the facilitator from The Department of Environmental Conservation in Albany gave us so many great resources to use in our future classrooms. We started out with an icebreaker activity. I really liked the activity, because it made us think, but we also met people as we did it. Randy gave us cards with a species on it, and we had to find either the adult or baby version of that species. For example, I had a butterfly. My job was to find the caterpillar, because that is the baby version of the butterfly. this was a great way to pre-assess, and also as a great icebreaker. Another activity that we did was designing our own fish by rolling the dice! This activity was so fun. we rolled the dice to find out what mouth to put, the coloration, the tail shape, body shape, and the type of reproduction for our fish. this was fun to see all the different kids of fish we all created! Another activity we did was with the beads and pipe cleaner. we had to roll the dice to tell us what station to go to. There was soil, glaciers, plants, lake, river, clouds, ocean, etc. overtime we landed on that station to go to, we added that color bead. this showed us how many of these are a big part of our planet. For example, when I landed on ocean, I kept getting ocean so I kept adding beads. This put into perspective how big the ocean really is compared to everything else! This would be great use for children who are unsure how big and important the ocean is to the earth. Another activity we did was "fishing" with different sized nets. From large holes to very small holes, we can see the types of fish we can catch with each net. For example, the net with the very small hole, we were able to catch almost every size fish. We did not use actual fish, we used lima beans, black beans, pinto beans, lentils, and rice. These different objects represented different fish. This was a really great activity to show how fishing works. One of the other activities we did outside, the cold, windy weather didn't stop us! I really enjoyed this 5 hour experience, and I'm glad we got two helpful textbook resources as well!