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Schoolyard Water Education

Imagine your school campus as a living lab for your students and a green hub for the community.
WMG can help energize students by creating outdoor classrooms that harvest rainwater and greywater, grow a shady oasis, produce food, and provide habitat for birds, bees, butterflies, lizards, and more!
Click here to learn how your school can work with WMG
Visit our Living Lab and Learning Center (LLLC) or we can come to you!

From learning stations to schoolyard rain garden living labs - we have something for you, your class, and your school! 

Start by bringing your class to our Living Lab and engage in a diverse range of interactive learning stations or we can bring them to you! Pick one or more from our available learning stations include the following:

  • Paper Watersheds - create a personal paper watershed to see how water flows and understand non-point source pollution (20min, middle school and older)
  • The River and the City in the Sonoran Desert - a story-telling activity exploring the relationship between urban Tucson and restoring our rivers (20min, all ages)
  • River of Dreams - students participate in a reflective group activity to visualize the river of their dreams and how to translate that into action for the future of Tucson's rivers (20min)
  • Healthy and Resilient Desert Soils - learn about soil health and resilience through interactive soil assessment and soil health management practices, and then apply new knowledge in a team setting to solving a challenge (60min, 6-12th grades)
  • Heat and Micro-Climates - use temperature gauges to explore the relationships between shade, sun, and various surfaces (20min, 4th grade)
  • Bringing Nature into the City - a simple activity to understand runoff patterns comparing natural and urban environments including impacts of green stormwater infrastructure to minimize flooding (20min, all ages)
  • How Low Can you Go? - a hands-on activity that highlights diverse water resource conservation techniques to support both climate resilience and river restoration (60-90min, middle school and older)
  • The Tippy Tap: Engineering and Design - students work in teams to build a tippy tap, a simple and effective water conservation device (20min, 1st-6th grade)
  • Composting Toilets: Turning Waste into Resources - learn about the composting process with composting toilets and their role in turning waste into resources and conserving water (20min, 1st-8th grades, can be adapted)

 

Interested in enhancing your schoolyard and developing rain garden projects? Contact us to learn how we can work with you.

View an interactive map of WMG's Schoolyard projects. And just change the filter above the map to see other water-harvesting projects installed by WMG at public sites.

Schoolyard news

Phoenix’s hottest neighborhood just got a lot greener, thanks to a WMG water-harvesting project at the Wilson School District in central Phoenix. In the area around the school surface temperatures in the summer can reach up to 170 degrees—15 degrees hotter than in communities at the city edges bordering the desert. The school is combating their urban heat island effect by working with WMG to implement creative green infrastructure solutions to grow shade to cool the school...