Fifth-graders make rain barrels in environmental lesson

If you ask Rashad Fitch about water quality in our area, he will tell you that the James River is polluted from storm-water runoff.

Ask Barrett Moses and he will tell you that pet waste is a big source of bacteria in area streams.

Barrett, Rashad and 35 other fifth-graders in Carrie Lewis’ class at Dearington Elementary can tell you those things because they spent the school year learning about water quality impacts.

Lewis, who teaches math and science, used the environment as a concrete illustration for almost every subject, from reading to math, and science to art. Students were given real-world applications to school questions through what Lewis called a thematic learning. Part of the lesson included making rain barrels, some of which are up for grabs because some students can’t take them home.

“We’re trying to teach students to be environmentally responsible,” Lewis said. “We’re trying to give them the empowerment that they each can do something.”

A North Carolina company donated 75 plastic barrels that once held 55 gallons of pickles. Starting in April, the students cleaned them, installed the fixtures

themselves and are spending the last days of school painting on complex designs. A Chesapeake Bay Foundation grant paid for what wasn’t donated. Once complete, the barrels can be hooked up to downspouts on buildings and when it rains, the runoff from the roof will be stored for later use.

“You can do anything with it except drink it because it’s not potable,” Rashad said.

Allyson Turner-Moreno said her parents will allow her to connect the barrel to her house, and she and her father will use the stored rainwater in their garden. She is painting a design of clouds with raindrops that turn into musical notes as they hit the ground, she said.

Every aspect of making the barrel was a lesson, Lewis said. For example, the students calculated exactly how much of each color paint would be needed for their design by drawing on a grid, counting and multiplying. “It took a lot of math,” Isaac Williams said.

In addition to a trip to Jamestown for hands-on water quality education, the students also held mock discussions where they pretended to be city leaders making decisions about development and growth as a way to better understand how to apply their learning to the real world, Lewis said.

“When they get emotionally involved with something, that’s a key learning moment because they’ll take in all that information,” Lewis said. “They all know that one thing they can do is go home and tell people (about the environment) and now they have a vehicle, the rain barrels, to discuss it. And if the questions come, they can really educate others.”

The students now can explain how something as small as rain barrels can have an overall impact on the environment.

Water quality is impacted by something called non-point source pollution, Rashad said. It’s called that “because we don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s not coming from one point.”

The pollution could be anything, from oil on roads to pet waste and fertilizer on lawns, Barrett. “When it rains, the water picks up stuff on the road and goes into the stream.”

Storing the runoff from the roof rather than letting it wash into streams helps lessen that impact little by little, they said.

The overall lessons also left students with ideas of things they can do on their own to help improve area water quality.

“I’m going to clean up the dog waste in my yard,” Barrett said, “because I don’t want any of that nasty bacteria going into the streams.”