By: Amy Zvonar
Alabama Cooperative Extension Agents make a splash with 4-H AWW training!
Making a Splash: Water Education Made Easy with 4-H Alabama Water Watch is an initiative to engage extension agents across the state in teaching AWW’s water resources programming. 14 extension agents (and a classroom teacher!) took advantage of this new workshop and discovered how easy and valuable it is to incorporate water lessons into their outreach efforts.
Why did AWW create this new workshop? 4-H Extension Agents play a crucial role in educating youth across our state about water resources, enabling AWW to broaden our impact and reach new audiences. Providing all 15 participants with 6 new water lessons they can implement in classrooms, after-school clubs, summer camp programs, and public events throughout Alabama ensures AWW’s water education resources are used across the state.
In addition, extension agents must be dynamic in their teaching, ready to cover a topic like watersheds in 15 short minutes during a public outreach event or spend an entire 6-10 week after school program exploring water. AWW staff decided we could meet this need by making every lesson created for this workshop flexible and easy to modify.
During the morning, participants learned lessons covering water stewardship, Alabama’s waters, and worldwide water quantity and access from AWW staff members Mona Dominguez, Sydney Zinner, and Amy Zvonar. The workshop participants were then asked to teach the lessons to each other! As they practiced teaching and received feedback from their colleagues, participants discovered ways to personalize the lessons to their own communities.
In the afternoon, we introduced participants to the Enviroscape. Enviroscapes are useful models for helping people understand the concept of a watershed and how point source and non-point source pollution impact our watershed.
To provide our participants with as much experience as possible with this versatile teaching tool, AWW invited the 4-H Youth Development Coordinator of Clarke County, Wendy Padgett, to explain how she has adapted and modified the Enviroscape lesson for classroom and after-school club use.
AWW has been able to distribute multiple Enviroscape models to extension offices across the state, and Wendy’s demonstration helped build the capacity of extension agents to utilize these tools in their teaching. We were even able to send a new Enviroscape model home with extension agents from Lauderdale County and are eager to hear how they put it to use!
Our final activity of the day took on the challenge extension agents face when trying to provide accurate and impactful information in a short period of time. During this portion of the workshop, AWW staff taught workshop participants how to modify our 60-minute lesson plans to be taught in 15 minutes or less. For example, a one-hour lesson on macroinvertebrates became a 5-minute tabling activity at a fair or festival, while a lesson on testing water quality was shortened to 15 minutes for an after-school club.
At the end of the day, workshop participants went home with copies of America’s Amazon poster, six water resources lessons, and many more ideas they learned from their colleagues. The staff of AWW came away from the day excited about the energy and enthusiasm extension agents have for teaching about water and sharing the importance of protecting and conserving Alabama’s water resources!
