Water Rocks!

New Hampton fourth grade students left class on Thursday knowing a watershed is an area of land that drains into a common water body and some things they could do to protect it.Two Iowa State University staffers, Todd Stevens, outreach specialist, and part-timer Taylor Kuehn, New Hampton High School Class of 2016 and ISU Class of 2019, began by asking that students name natural resources, such as soil, minerals, oil, trees and the sun, and noted these all exist in the watershed.Stevens had students “glue those fingers together” to form a bowl and make rainstorm noises.“Where did the water go?” Kuehn asked as students indicated their palms, the low part.Students learned New Hampton drains to the Wapsipinicon River, and shared what they knew: the biggest river in Iowa, the Mississippi River, flows into the Gulf of Mexico and is bounded by the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. As the Mississippi drains into the gulf, pollution collects in the dead zone, which cannot sustain life.— For more on this story, see the Nov. 20 New Hampton Tribune.