Hello and Happy New Year!

Hoping your new year is off to a successful start and your students are enjoying their return to the classroom exploring exciting new topics! Just wanted to touch base mid-year with some program reminders and new resources! As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or curiosities as you're working through the unit with your classes. Looking forward to meeting you and your students on upcoming Enviroscape and field trip visits!

Schedule Your Spring Field Trips!

We are now scheduling spring field trips! Contact adee@sd1.org if you would like to schedule a field trip in April or May of 2023. We would love to host your school for a fun visit this spring! To learn more about field trips, click here.

Spring Field Trip Dates Currently Available*:

April 17th
May 1st
May 2nd
May 4th
May 8th
May 9th
May 15th

*If you are having trouble finding a date that works for your school on this list, we may be able to accommodate additional dates. Please reach out to me directly at adee@sd1.org and we will do our best to accommodate.

Check out the Spring Chaperone Training Calendar here.

Schedule a Lesson 2 Envrioscape In-Person or Virtual Classroom Visit with SD1

We are available to present the Water Pollution Lesson (now Lesson 2) to your class using the Enviroscape Model. We will also lead students in completing their Lesson 2 workbook material and have lots of fun exploring water pollution hands-on! Contact adee@sd1.org to schedule an in-person or live, virtual presentation with SD1.

Calling All Artists!

SD1 Storm Water Art Contest

Inspire action, with art! Encourage students to get creative with knowledge gained throughout the unit by creating storm water artwork to spread the word about storm water pollution. Students may enter individually or as a class. Prizes will be awarded for both categories, including an animal encounter visit with Newport Aquarium’s WAVE Foundation for the winning class entry! Click here or see the flyer below for more details. Feel free to reach out with any questions!

Feed Us Your Feedback!

By now many of you have started or completed SD1's updated Environmental Unit, thank you for your continued partnership! We are eager to hear how your experience with updated materials is going and would love to hear any and all feedback including the following:

Are students connecting the dots from watersheds to water pollution to BMP solutions by way of their school site map?
Do you feel like you have enough supplies to be successful with experiments in the classroom?
Are you supplementing lessons with any fun resources that you would like to share?

As a reminder, you can provide feedback at anytime via either a quick survey or Jamboard post linked in the Teacher Toolkit Feedback Hub...or you can always send me an email to let me know how things are going.

Your feedback is crucial in helping us to determine best ways to support teachers and students in learning about their environment and ways to protect our water through their experience with the unit. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and suggestions!

Make a Big Splash with Your Class!

At the bottom of each e-newsletter this year we are spotlighting some favorite "Big Splash" resources from the Teacher Toolkit and beyond.

When talking with students about solutions to water pollution they often suggest filtering storm drains or netting pollution out of waterbodies. Recently, I came across this cool new invention from young engineers in Hong Kong which reminded me of these creative conversations with our local students! While pollution prevention is most efficient, it's neat to see techy devices like this are being explored for clean up after pollution has occurred. Open Ocean Engineering team developed an AI-enabled robotic boat to clean up waterbodies in an effort to keep plastic trash out of the ocean.

I think your students will be impressed with their Clearbot Neo invention and video! You can read more about it here. Yet another reminder that, "the future belongs to the curious!"

In an effort to continuously improve SD1's Environmental Unit, we want to collect your feedback on an ongoing basis. Anytime you have something to share, whether it be a program suggestion, presenter review or helpful resource for others, visit the Feedback Hub page linked here in the Teacher Toolkit to send those ideas our way! You are always welcome to email me at adee@sd1.org as well.