Project Update

Today in Project Citizen, We learned about wasted water and potable water.How dangerous dirty water is if you drink it.We also learned that 20 jumbo jets full of people die each day from diarrhea caused by bad drinking water. Then we explored websites and learned about different water projects.Several of us researched ways to donate money to Haiti.Some farmers use water wisely and some don't.We also learned about our globe hydrolgy site.At clean water actoin.org we learned about electronic waste.

Water and Marine Mammals

We are studying about water. We are learning about our water shed, Tuolumne River. We are interested in the water quality, how the local community affects it, and what we can do to make it better. We watched a little bit of the video Poisoned Waters and learned about dead zones in oceans ecosystems, and how fisheries are declining.

We also talked about adopting a baby sea otter from the Marine mamal center His name is Calloway.

Dontations Tuolumne River Trust

Help Save the Tuolumne - Paddle to the Sea

Our teacher is participating in the Tuolumne River Trust's second annual Paddle to the Sea by paddling the 8th leg of the adventure. This leg goes from American Legion Park to Riverdale County park. This will be her first time on this section of the river...

http://paddletothesea.givezooks.com/grassroots_fundraisers/marj-and-karen-s-excellent-adventure

Where did the time go?

It seems as though we just started our project and bam here it is crunch time. It didn't help that I spent two prime working days stuck in negotiations. The kids were amazing today. We probably got more accomplished than we had in several months. It is tough editing all the writing. Wait till they hear that they all need to write a reflection on the process. :-)

The Crunch is On

I don't know where the time has gone...we have diligently been working each week to put together our portfolio and we are still going to have to do marathon sessions to pull it all together. Teams have been working on each section, but we are no where near ready to publish our research. On Monday we will begin putting the presentation board together and hammer out the writing for the portfolio.

Fun at Snowshoeing field trip

At the snowshoeing field trip to Calaveras big trees state park on Saturday March 27, 2010 we there got there around 12:00 p.m. had lunch then the children had a snowball fight. After that we hiked up to the warming hut and had some hot chocolate. Then we started are guided tour since there was hardly any snow to snowshoe the tour was on the North Grove trail. We saw a lot of Sequoias that had fallen and there were other trees there. After the hike we went to the gift shop and got back on the bus to leave. We ended up come back to Empire at 5:30 p.m..

snowshoeing field trip

This weekend we are going on a snowshoeing field trip on Saturday March 27, 2010 at Calaveras big trees state park. We will leave at 9:00 a.m. and be back at 4:00 p.m. . If there is barely any snow we will just have to walk but, if there is a lot of snow on the ground we will snowshoe.

Fish Release

Today we went to Toulumne River and Fox Grove.
First,we let the fish go at Waterford Urban Park.Then,we did some activities for the students by doing some water and chemical tests.After we went to Fox Grove and took a hike and played camouflage.We went to Stanislaus wildlife Care Center and learned about some animals.When we got back from our trip we found out that we left alot of fish, so we have to go back later on.


Julene Bazan

Mapping Our Hydrology Study Site

Yesterday I took a team of four from Project Citizen to map the site that my fourth graders and Project Citizen students are going to use for a hydrology study site. We will be using this site to monitor the health of the Tuolumne River. We chose this particular site because it gives the students easy access to the river.

We started our expedition by loading up my car with all our equipment. We had to do this after school so we weren't sure if we would have enough time to run our water tests. We took all our equipment just in case. After parking at the trailhead we took a nice walk along the riverbank to our site. Luckily we were able to find a 50 meter section that gave us access.

Our task was to measure and map our hydrology study site. After a little stone skipping practice we got down to work. While working we treated to visions of egrets, canadian geese, red tailed hawks, and mallards flying overhead. We even heard woodpeckers at work in the surrounding riparian habitat.

First, we measure a 10 meter distance from the riverbank to make sure we had the minimum distance. Then we set about laying down a transect line 50 meters long. We were so busy we didn't have much time to take photos except for the site photographs using the cardinal directions.

Next, we all took our turn at getting the GPS reading for the site. It was interesting to see how much variation there was with the elevation. Then each team member took site pictures. Just when we were getting ready to map Mr. Boothby arrived, it took us a little time to get a system together, but once we did the mapping went quite smoothly.

Hydrology Study

A team of four students and I are going to map out our hydrology study site. Students will be learning to map using scale. We will be using my brand new GPS to get the longitude,latitude, and elevation of the site. We will also be photographing the site to send with our documentation to GLOBE. On Monday our Project Citizen team members will be team leaders for my fourth grade class as we embark on our first hydrology study. Retford

updates on what we are doing

In the empire project citizen we are getting ready to go on many field trips later in the months. February,march,and maybe april are going to be very busy months and next friday we are doing the hydrology study run. But the whole class can't go only four and they are very patient students that are going. Dina

An Aerial View 2002

Here is a Google Earth view of our campus in 2002. You can see there were a lot of large trees, well over 30 years old

An Historical Perspective

When searching through photographs taken by the Project Citizen Action team in 2008 I found pictures of our campus that spring. We still had quite a few of our "old" trees, some were quite riddled with mistletoe.

Well last week most of the Project Citizen Students had a field trip to the Monteray Bay Aquarium.So it was just two of us including Mrs. Retford.We got alot more work done with just us three.We went to Google Earth and printed pictures of all of the trees that were there, before they either got cut down or were not getting taken care of and just fell over. Serenity

Preparing for Interview

Today a lot of our members were off on a field trip with the ASES program to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The small crew of two workers got quite a bit done. The girls re-read the questions that were developed last week for our upcoming interview with the head of maintenance for our school district. We also did some research on the benefits of having trees.

Project Citizen at Empire

Greetings, my name is Karen Retford and I am the teacher/facilitator for the Empire Project Citizen program. This is our third year using Project Citizen in our leadership and after school program. This year our members are fifth through eighth grade.

In our first year we took on green waste from the cafeteria. The students conducted surveys and proposed school board policy to designate Empire Elementary as a model green school. With the help of one of our parents we build a three bin compost bin. Unfortunately over the summer local vandals decided to destroy it.

Last year our topic was the Butterfly Way Station.There was 12 of us but only 8 of us went to the showcase and presented our presentation on May 19,2009.It took us about 30 minutes for us to practice our lines and what we were going to say. :) sincerely
(:Sydnee:)