17TH ANNUAL CHILDREN’S WATER FESTIVAL UPCOMING
Since 2015, Pierce Conservation District has organized the Children’s Water Festival,
an annual event for local 5th graders. Now entering its 17th year, the Festival continues
to showcase the valuable environmental education resources here in our community.
Roughly 120 volunteers from local agencies, education organizations and the community
at large come together each year to make this event happen. The University of Puget
Sound Tacoma, another fantastic partner, allows the event to utilize spaces on campus
to educate the nearly 700 5th graders that attend.
To find out how you can be a part of the 2020 Festival or any of our Environmental Education Programs, please visit our website piercecd.org, call (253) 845-9770 x112 or e-mail ChrisT@piercecd.org.
LEARNING IN THE SCHOOL GARDEN
Each week as the kids put their eyes on the garden,
they remark how much the plants have grown. It’s
been a week since the last Garden Club and they’re
eager to see progress. Then it’s time to get to work,
weeding, watering, and putting signs together.
As part of the Expanded Learning Opportunities
program, a partnership between Tacoma Public
Schools and the Greater Tacoma Community
Foundation, we host after school garden clubs at two
local elementary schools. The program is meant to
provide a constructive after school space for students
and to deliver unique programming on a weekly basis.
Some clubs focus on art, others on engineering. In
ours, we involve kids in growing food and learning
about the environment. We use raised beds at their
school to get them involved in growing their gardening
skills, which we hope they’ll take with them to use for
a lifetime.
PIERCE COUNTY OUTDOOR LIFE
We are fortunate to be a community partner in Pierce County’s
Outdoor LIFE series, which reaches court-associated youth with
outdoor and environmental programming. Now in its second year,
the program had a successful pilot year, reaching 26 youth. This
winter we’ll involve the youth in activities like water testing and
installing native plants.