Ok well this was a CRAZY experience…
We were give the Citro A. resource “A Little Bit of Dirt” a couple weeks back and I was SO excited to see we were going to be building the lakes this week! I thought this lesson plan was so powerful and an incredible way of implementing environmental education and place-based education into your curriculum. I had all these ideas for students to get involved in their community, investigate if they have any lakes nearby being polluted by human development, and so on.
So naturally, practicing this activity excited me. I read the story to my boyfriend and as we read we poured the the different solutions into the large tub of water. We used:
Food colouring – pesticides
Flour – sawdust
Dirt – Dirt
Soaps -shampoo
Oils – Olive oil
Poop – chocolate sprinkles
Our tub looked disgusting by the end of the activity. It was brown, dirty, and unwelcoming. My boyfriend, who lives on Moyie Lake, said after the activity, “that is ridiculous. Our lake has been developed by and never looked like that.” He was wrong. After
we agued for a bit, I inquired with his father if he remembers a time when the lake was filthy. His father couldn’t recall a time when the lake looked unwelcoming. However, as a junior mine owner himself, he was sure when the Moyie mine was first opened the lake would have been filled with oils, dirt and other foreign products. He then recalled the Moyie Lake fire in 2017. He shared with me the photo to the left. He is a stubborn man who stayed in his lake front home this close to the fire throughout the entire fire. He recalled waking up one morning to ash lining the shores of the beach. He said he wouldn’t have entered the water with fear he would come out coated in the ash that laid on the top of the water. Thinking about the story we had just read, I wondered whether the ash would have negatively effected the life within the ocean.
Unfortunately, the photos from building my own lake are not able to upload. I have tried and tried and tried some more. So I hope you can imagine our gross dirty lake and how inspired by it we were to keep our lakes clean afterwards.