The reason kids like us should get involved is that we can make a huge difference. We want our world to be a good place for our children. This means learning and doing things to help make our communities and our world a better place!

Rain Garden

Rain gardens are easy to make and are beautiful additions to a yard. When you make a rain garden you can improve local water quality because it allows rain to seep into the ground. This prevents polluted runoff.

Polluted runoff is a big problem in cities where much of the ground is covered with hard surfaces such as roads, streets, parking lots and sidewalks. When water flows across the hard surfaces it picks up pollutants and eventually runs into the storm drains. This water flows directly into local lakes, streams, and rivers.

If you make a rain garden, you are creating a beautiful natural area that will attract birds and butterflies while doing something good for the environment.

What makes a garden a rain garden? All it takes are a few simple steps!

How to create a rain garden

1. Select a location in a naturally wet area.

2. Dig a hole as long and as wide as you like and approximately 6" -8" deep.

3. Take the soil from the hole you just dug and use a shovel to mix it with sand so that you have about 25% soil and 75% sand.

4. Break up the soil in the bottom of the hole.

5. Spread the sandy soil mixture evenly in the hole.

6. Find out which plants are native to your area. Place the native plants in the sandy soil mixture. Remember to consider sunlight and spacing when selecting plants.

7. Place a layer of mulch around the plants that is about 4" -6" thick.

8. Make sure your garden gets plenty of water while it is trying to grow. Enjoy!

How Can I Help?

Start helping by learning to do things on your own! Kids cannot always wait for an adult to have a great idea. Kids have great ideas and everyone can pitch in and help keep the environment clean. You've already taken the first step by reading this website! Now, get your friends involved and start your own project in your community, town, or city.

Be a volunteer. Get some friends together and monitor a stream by collecting insects that live in the bottom of the stream. It is a fun and easy way to find out if the water is clean.

Have a stream walk. This is for groups who want to educate volunteers about pollution problems. Volunteers walk and look to see if the habitat is clean. Don't forget to bring trash bags!

Set up a clean up day at your local stream, river, pond, lake, or other body of water. You could announce it in the newspaper, at school, and make flyers to hang in stores around your town. You could ask volunteers to come and help clean up the trash on the land around the river. Get people with boats or canoes to help clean up the trash and debris in the water. You could even adopt an area and clean it up on a regular basis.

Conduct water chemistry studies. Volunteers can train and learn from someone who helps them conduct water chemistry studies.

Has CSI: Cahaba Student Investigators ever done anything to be involved?

The answer to that question is YES.

It was our first trip to the Cahaba River and the refuge. We were walking around seeing the sights. Almost everywhere we looked we could see trash. There were bottles, cans, and paper. We decided to help make the refuge a cleaner place. We got a garbage bag and we were on our way. It didn't take long to get a bag full of trash. A little while later, we heard a very loud noise. We were astonished to see a hovercraft go whizzing by. We had never seen a hovercraft before. It looks like a big raft, but it has a cushion of air that keeps it on top of the water. It headed down the river and was out of sight. A few minutes later it came by again and we all waved. The hovercraft turned and stopped right in front of us. It was so cool!

A man stepped out of the boat and he was dressed up. We wondered who he was because there was also a man in the hovercraft with a big camera. The man told us he was from the television news station in a nearby city. He gave us his business card and introduced himself. He asked if he could interview us for the news! He asked us what we were doing on the river and we told him about our ThinkQuest team and how we were making a website about stream monitoring and pollution. He asked what was in our bag. We told him about all the trash we picked up around the river.

The story he was working on was about the Cahaba River. It is a beautiful river that many people do not even know about. Soon after that, Mrs. Harris called us and told us we would be on the news that night! We couldn't help but talk about it the next day at school.

The story of our website and our project is spreading around our county, too. There was an article about us in the newspaper. The Friends of the Cahaba River National Wildlife Refuge is having a Renew Our Rivers Clean Up Day on April 21st. We plan to be right there helping with the clean up. Every time we go to Caffee Creek to monitor the water someone from our community has shown up to help us! The adults tell us we are the future of the river!

Mr. Holsombeck  and Mr. Sansing visit CSI Detectives during a water monitoring visit.  Mr. Holsombeck  grew up just a few miles from the river and spent many sunny days playing and swimming here.

Other ways we will continue to be involved even when this website is finished!

• Ms. Fancher helped us get $500 to make a rain garden at our school. When we are finished with this website we will start working on making a rain garden. Many people around our town are helping us to find out which plants would grow best in our rain garden. We plan to continue our biological stream monitoring project even though this is our last year at this school.
• We show the other kids in our class what we've been doing at the river. After our school's achievement testing is over in April, we will help Mrs. Harris teach them what we learned about using macroinvertebrates to monitor the water. We have already shown our classmates pictures of macroinvertebrates and we have played some games to help them identify the little critters. We've already demonstrated how we use the kick net. Guess what we will use to help teach our class? THIS WEBSITE, of course! The entire fourth grade is going on a field trip to the Cahaba River and Caffee Creek in May. The trip is a part of the Shane Hulsey CLEAN Field Environmental Education Program program sponsored by the Cahaba River Society.
• When we go on trips or outings to a place that has a lake, stream, or river we can't help but start looking under rocks for macroinvertebrates. We are sharing what we've learned with our brothers, sisters, friends, and parents. Daniel found many macroinvertebrates in a mountain creek on a recent trip to Tennessee.

We definitely believe that WE are the key to the future of our water!

Make the Connection

1. Polluted runoff can be helped by

2. What are two things a kid can help make sure the water is clean?

Learn More

Join a Project! Take a Dip: The Water in Our Lives

CLEAN - Children Learning about the Environments Across the Nation

Kleen Up Kops

Other collaborative projects sponsored by CIESE

Citations

Cahaba River Society. CLEAN. Retrieved February 2007 from http://www.cahabariversociety.org/clean.htm .

CIESE Collaborative Projects. Retrieved March 2007 from http://www.k12science.org/collabprojs.html .

CLEAN - India. Retrieved March 2007 from http://www.cleanindia.org/resoucewatch/watermain.htm .

Create a Rain Garden. Retrieved March 2007 from http://raingardens.org/docs/Create_A_Rain_Garden.pdf

Oceanside Clean Water Program. Just for Kids. Retrieved January 2007 from http://www.oceansidecleanwaterprogram.org/kids.asp .

Rain Gardens ----Gardening with Water Quality in Mind. Retrieved March 2007 from http://www.infinetivity.com/~stack/rain/ .

Storm Water Management Authority, Inc. Rain Gardens. (Brochure with no publication date)

Take a Dip: The Water in Our Lives. Retrieved November 2006 from http://www.k12science.org/curriculum/dipproj2/en/ .

TVA Kids. Clean Water. Retrieved February 2007 from http://www.tvakids.com/environment/cleanwater2.htm

TVA Kids.com. Watershed Team. Retrieved February 2007 from http://www.tvakids.com/environment/cleanwater_teams.htm .

Water Education Foundation. Water Kids. Retrieved January 2007 from http://www.water-ed.org/kids.asp .

Water-Learning and Living. Biodiversity and Ecosystems. Retrieved March 2007 from http://www.watercare.net/wll/bio-monitoring.html .