Mom brought her Watershed students over this afternoon for their annual boat races. My own kids were pretty excited. The watershed group did the races here in the canal in our back yard last year, too. This year the water is so high and fast in most places on the reservation not a lot of our creeks and rivers are safe. The other benefit of this location is that we live right by the school so the kids can all just walk over. My kids love having the visitors. Israel helps catch the boats at the finish line so they don't continue on downstream. Azia's not quite old enough to officially join the program, but the challenge of designing and building a boat to race is her sort of thing. And as an added bonus this year, the students are learning about noxious weeds and the group is making a point to leave each place they visit better than they found it. So, they started their visit with about 15 minutes of 15 people pulling white top in my back yard (which is currently disguised as a white top field). They hauled out a huge pile of garbage bags full of weeds.
Eight years ago Mom created this summer program and began teaching kids (through mostly hands on projects and exploration of their local surroundings) all about the watershed. It's really an amazing opportunity and one of the coolest things is that it's totally free. They've been able to fund it with grants, so it doesn't cost kids anything. In other places a science camp like this would be hundreds of dollars. I love that our kids here aren't missing out on great experiences like that just because they don't have the money to participate. The local paper had a great article about them on the front page today:
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