Two-thousand grade-schoolers from all over Iowa gather in the central part of the state Wednesday for the 9th Iowa Children’s Water Festival. Coordinator Linda Kinman says they’re all from fifth-grade classes around the state. Before the festival started up she says they did “kind of a study” and concluded kids at this age can learn the concepts and put them into use in their lives. If a “water festival” doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you yearned for as a kid, you might be wrong…Kinman says the kids spend half a day at the Ankeny campus of Des Moines Area Community College. They’ll attend 3 classroom activities and a stage production, plus there are “large-game activities” and an exhibit hall. Kinman compares it to a convention adults might go to, “only in a smaller form.” Events include a water magician, recycling relays, “kitchen chemistry”, water Jeopardy and even basic fly-fishing.As a fun day of learning, it’s designed to make everything interactive. The kids will do things like using food items to build aquifers, so they can see how groundwater gets there, and how it’s pumped out to be used as drinking water. They’ll use miniature “stream tables” to model towns and farms. Then they’ll “let it rain” on their city, seeing how the things they’ve put in there move water across the landscape and learning how things we do in our daily life have an impact on water quality. The steering committee includes people from the DNR as well as engineers, water agencies, and the US Geological Survey. The spring term’s ended at DMACC so the kids take over their campus for the day. They need a couple hundred volunteers every year to serve as class guides for the festival, so anyone who wants to help next year or come up with an exhibit can learn more by surfing to iowachildrenswaterfestival.org/
Iowa's Radio News Network
