Three community powerhouses team up to educate dozens of students with Project Wild workshop

THE WOODLANDS, TX – Recently, key members of Lake Creek Preserve, Magnolia Independent School District, and the Magnolia Rotary Club partnered together to perform some ‘outside’ educating of sixty lucky young students.

Presenting a Rotary District Grant project, Magnolia Rotary Club got together with the Lake Creek Greenway Partnership in an effort to enhance Environmental Science education in the Magnolia area.

The project consisted of three components. First, the club and partnership presented a Project Wild workshop designed to give teachers, Rotary members and select students new tools for teaching about water, soil, and wildlife issues. Next, it donated two Enviroscape watershed models to Magnolia ISD to enhance teaching about water pollution. Third, the team conducted two field trips for more than five dozen sixth-graders to help teach them about water, soil, and wildlife using models and actual, practical examples.

In the Project Wild workshop, students partook in the academic design of a walkable low impact town, learned to match animals by relationship, and used games to teach limiting factors.

Next came the donation of the Enviroscape models. These briefcase-sized models provide hands-on, interactive demonstrations of the sources and effects of water pollution, easily demonstrating how storm water runoff carries pollutants through the watershed to a pond, lake, river, bay, or ocean – and the best management practices to prevent this type of pollution from occurring.

Magnolia Rotary Club president Glenn Buckley, who is also the president of the board of the Lake Creek Greenway Partnership, spoke with the Montgomery ISD board and an audience of parents and students

The students took a field trip to Unity Park, where at the pavilion there they learned about watersheds, aquifers, sources of pollution, soil characteristics, and soil ecology. They took soil cores and used a live owl to learn the food chain.

Three Rotarians (one being an instructor), seven members of Interact, two staff from the local YMCA, two Lone Star College students, and four teachers and youth leaders comprised the team. Site visits were supported by eight Rotary Club members, two Texas master naturalists, and three Lake Creek Greenway Partnership members. They all worked together to educate a total of 67-sixth grade students and three teachers.

Lunches for the project were donated by Chick-Fil-A and Papa John's Pizza. Additionally, the organizers presented a Wild Texas all-day event for educators at the Magnolia Event Center to resounding success.

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