As Watershed Classroom projects progress students produce and collect materials and data. These artifacts highlight different aspects of their project and are ideal for creating tabling displays. The tabling portion of the Student Showcase is held a half-hour before and after the students' presentations to the community. It is an opportunity for visitors to interact not only with students, but also with the materials gathered and displayed; it is a tactile, physical way to engage with each project.

In past years classes have displayed work samples and photographs on poster board surrounded by additional artifacts; another class transformed their table into a riparian plant identification quiz. While they differ in approach, class tables are a terrific way for guests to better understand the scope of each project.  

Teacher Matt Jackson has mastered the art of directing his 7th grade students through five water-testing stations. The lesson begins the night before with a homework assignment asking students to read through and paraphrase why we test water features; and what can temperature, turbidity, levels of ammonia, nitrates, dissolved oxygen, and salinity tell us about the health of our creeks and tidal slough. Each student independently reads and explains the significance of each water element tested. By asking students to become familiar with the purpose of each test, when they begin testing the following day they have context and understand the value of their results.

The following morning students filter into the classroom where their tables have been set up as testing stations. Each station has materials for four students to test one feature of the water. Mr. Jackson has collected two buckets of water from nearby Lynch creek, and they now sit filled in the front of the class. He instructs the students that they will be rotating, with their table group, through five testing stations. Because testing salinity and temperature are quick, students complete those tests at one station. The students testing the ammonia level dictate the timing of the rotations, as the test requires a five-minute wait.

What is a watershed, why is it important, and how can we better understand our place in it?

These questions drive the Watershed Classroom, our teachers, and our students. As technology and media continue to be paramount in our lives, the understanding of our interconnectedness is often overlooked or forgotten.  When our community once bartered eggs for goods, harvested food from local gardens and farms, our relationship to our local environment was very clear. But when we begin buying food from stores and online, staying inside to enjoy media rather than parks, the relationships within the community and environment become more vague. Vague relationships are easy to forget. Petaluma educators have the weighty task of reintroducing students to their surroundings, to our unique and historical watershed.

Watershed Classroom teachers bring students out of the classroom and show them the richness around them.