The youngest presenter to the Lyons Ecology Advisory Board on Tuesday was a pre-schooler who talked about the science and conservation he learned about in class.
“Science is fun!” he concluded to applause.
The preschool student was one of a slate of presenters at the Confluence 2022 hosted by Lyons Elementary School and Lyons Middle Senior High School. The presentations of environmental leadership and conservation learning were part of the Lyons Ecology Advisory Board meeting.
Board member Dave Batts talked about how Lyons unique ecology makes an ideal living laboratory for students, which is why the advisory board along with other organizations partner with the schools.
“We want to see the kids out in the parks,” Batts said. “We want to see them out in the rivers. We want to see them climbing the hills and learning about the natural environment because really at the end of the day they are our future for the environment.”
Lyons elementary principal Andrew Moore explained that the showcase came from a collaboration following the 2013 floods that asked what the schools and community wanted to build.
“The real driving question was, what if students had so much engagement and agency in their community that they could make things happen?” he said. “And what if we actually leveraged the environment, which is our playground and our laboratory, to be able to do that?”
Presentations from preschool, kindergarten and first grade students highlighted their work learning to observe the world around them, recording notes and observations. In the later elementary years, students start to ask questions and find answers, with second graders working to grow enough food in their gardens to make a salad for the whole second grade.
In third grade, Lyons students learned about the town’s climate and the natural hazards that could impact the community like fires and flood. Fourth graders constructed a timeline about the history of Lyons, and fifth graders conducted river health tests while raising rainbow trout.
Sixth and seventh grade students talked about their surveys of the local watershed in partnership with the Lefthand Watershed Center. This year they established baseline data that students will continue to collect each year.
Eighth graders presented their work on fire protection with a proposal to improve the forest health of a Bureau of Land Management parcel near Lyons that they are hoping to implement.
High schoolers talked about their research into microplastics in Lyons waterways in partnership with the OceanFirst Institute. Using dried sediment samples, students found that microplastics averaged 13 parts per million.
Another high school student talked about her work at the Innovation Center helping to reintroduce the endangered northern redbelly dace to local waterways, including Rooney Pond in Lyons. Members of the River Watch club highlighted their data reporting to Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
Moore emphasized the importance of community partnerships in helping students to become the community’s current and future leaders who will protect and advance natural resources.
“We think it’s a valuable opportunity for students to engage in data literacy, so as students progress through the grades we hope that they can really collect, understand, synthesize, interpret and then communicate data,” Moore said. “It’s a critical skill set… To be able to really understand science in this way is really critical in our current era.”
Along with Lyons, Boulder County Parks and Open Space, Colorado River Water, Colorado Trout Unlimited, Left Hand Water Shed, OceanFirst Education and Rocky Mountain National Park are some of the other partners who make the student’s work possible.
