School logo
here - op,onal
Picture of
team?
Water you doing to teach others
about watersheds?
Stephen-Argyle Central (ie. Tamarac River Watershed)
March 15, 2017
Introduction
This winter we taught 4th graders and gave them a pre test to understand what the
children might already know about watersheds. We then taught them 6 different lessons;
including what a watershed is and what we do as riverwatch students. To teach the kids we
divided them into 6 different stations and they rotated after 7 minutes; you’ll notice that the
stations match the sections in the poster. After teaching them we gave them the same test
and saw 130% improvement. The children really seemed to enjoy and learn a lot from the
lessons and fun activities.
A quote from Darby, a 4th grader, “I thought the pretest was hard before you taught us
stuff, then it was a piece of cake!”
We received some thank you letters in the mail about how much they appreciated us
coming in. You will see quotes from the fourth graders throughout the poster.
What is Riverwatch?
What is a watershed?
Confluences and Tributaries
In the pictures above you can see that we taught the kids about confluences and
tributaries. A confluence is the point where a river meets another river or lake. A
Tributary is a smaller river that flows out of a larger river, lake, or ditch. Most of the
Tamarac River’s tributaries are ditches, not including the lost river, which is the only
true tributary of the Tamarac River. The Tamarac River itself is a tributary flowing into
the Red River of the North. We used Plexiglas to draw over a map to show the kids
example of tributaries and confluences. We used the Tamarac, Middle, and Red River as
examples for them.
• 
• 
• 
• 
In all of Marshall County and a little bit of Roseau County
Includes towns of Stephen, Karlstad and Strandquist
drains an area of 281,000 acres
The river is 82.1 miles long
Tamarac Watershed
“ Thank you Abi and Abbey for teaching me where the Tamarac
River, Middle River, and Red River is and for teaching me what
tributary means too. “-Nora
A bathtub was used as an example of a watershed, because it all drained into
one area. The kids were also taught that watersheds can be very large, like the
Mississippi River watershed, or small like the Tamarac River watershed that is
shown above. They understood that the water would flow into the lowest area
when we played with sand and ping pong balls.
•  Within the activity the kids would make two different watersheds within the
sand and use ping pong balls to resemble rain.
•  Their goal was to try and guess where the water would land.
6MC
HW34
GC
What is Riverwatch? What do we do? These are just a few questions that we explained to the 4th
graders. Once a month for 9 months we go out to 5 sites and monitor 2 rivers to get all the
information that we need. This is what is done while testing.
•  Measure the width and depth of river
•  Use Van Dorn to collect water from river
•  Secci tube is used to see transparency of water
•  Sonde- collects temperature, pH, water flow and more of the river
•  Make obersavations about the conditions outside
Here is a quote from Charlotte “When I am in High School I want to be a riverwatch student!”
Headwaters and mouth
On this Map above it shows you the three sites that the Stephen-Argyle
Central Riverwatch group test.
•  HW34 is located on Highway 34 and it is the most upstream of the three
sites, it is 7 miles East and 2 miles South of Stephen.
•  GC is a test site that is in the town of Stephen on the bridge near the Golf
Course. In the late summer we see algae blooms at that site because of
fertilization and low water flow.
•  6MC is the 6 miles west of Stephen, and is basically a ditch. It usually is
very shallow and slow moving.
•  The Tamarac originates eight miles east and eight miles north of
Middle River
•  starts as part of Judicial Ditch #19
•  The mouth of the Tamarac River is the Red River.
Water cycle
Human activity in our watershed
•  Human population in Tamarac watershed 1,462
•  Land use in this portion of the watershed
•  cropland (68.67 percent),
•  developed (4.64 percent),
•  wetlands(13.22 percent),
•  rangeland (3.15 percent),
•  forest/shrub (9.95 percent),
•  open water (0.37 percent)
•  Pollution waste water treatment facilities (point source) also
row crops, and housing development (non point source)
We dealt with the water cycle, and how a watershed affects the water
cycle. We had a visual demonstration of the water cycle so they could
follow along. We started out with precipitation, our favorite part of the
cycle! The kids named off many different types of precipitation, this
including rain, snow, sleet, and hail. Then working backwards we
explained how that rain or snow was formed with condensation. We
were impressed that most of them knew what evaporation was and
how it fits in with the water cycle. A new favorite word for them is
H2O, meaning water!
In the pictures above you will see tubes that were used for explaining the
headwaters and the mouth of a river. We used tubes to resemble a river and
the 4th graders would name the parts of the tubes.
Thank You’s
“Dear Riverwatch Students, I had a blast. Thank you for giving your time to help us
learn. I have learned a lot since you came. My favorite thing was when we knew what a
watershed was. Hope you will come again soon! Sincerely, Signe”
“Thank you for letting us play with the sand.” -Hailey
We presented to the elementary about pollution. We talked about how
humans affect our watershed through pollution and the different types of
pollution humans create, we did this through a computer simulation game.
We explained different things that pollute the water such as runoff,
dumping of wastes, factories, etc. A big topic we talked about is farming
pollution in our region and how agriculture affects our watershed.
Contact Information:
sac.k12.mn.us
[email protected]
“Support for the River Watch Program is provided by the State of
Minnesota Clean Water Fund and the Red River Watershed Management
Board.”
In this map above you see the Red River
Valley, which is the Rid River Watershed.
The Tamarac is a sub watershed of the Red
River. (highlighted in green) The Tamarac
River watershed covers 372.61 square miles
“Thanks for coming to our school to teach us about rivers.” -Dawson
Team members:
Jules Efta
Kailyn Hrynyshyn
Parker Riopelle
Myah Svendsen
Kassidy Hultgren
Brooke Hunstad
Autumn Thompson
Madalynn Weberg
Rachel Bergeron
Ananhi Martinez
Zach Nordine
Carson Pagnac
Emma Rominski
Abbey Johnson
Tyler Hebert
Abi McGlynn
Mikayla Bolduc
Kristina Swenseid
Lexie Parker
Advisor/Teacher:
Mr. Garry Kotts