Albuquerque Bernalillo County Children’s Water Festival

Water comes to life for fourth grade students and teachers who participate in this exciting field trip!  Students might “engineer” a process to clean river water for drinking, produce a cloud, become household products that contaminate our wastewater stream, or play a game to learn about the perils and challenges in the life of our native Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout.  Our goal is for students to understand what they can do to conserve water and keep source water clean.

The Experiential EE Festival Team currently produces this two-day event which serves over 1,000 Albuquerque area fourth grade students.  The event – including school bus transportation – is provided free of charge to participants thanks to the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.  In addition, many in-kind sponsors provide presenters and volunteers to help implement and evaluate this high quality event.

Festival activities cover a wide range of core curriculum areas including science, language arts, math and social studies.  All activities are tied to the fourth grade New Mexico Science Standards and Benchmarks.  Students rotate through five activities lasting 30 minutes each.  The goal is for each class to attend one activity in each major topic area:

Assessment

Experiential EE, LLC’s approach to assessment is unique because we are able to demonstrate impact of our programs – a difficult achievement in the world of informal education and public outreach.  For this festival, we incorporate pre- and post-festival student surveys, an independent activity evaluation, teacher survey and volunteer survey.

Effective assessment tools provide highly useful feedback for everyone involved.  Close communication between the Festival Team and festival presenters about students’ understanding of concepts covered at the children’s water festival has resulted in a performance improvement each of the past four years on the post-festival student survey.  In other words, presenters have modified their activities and facilitation in direct response to information we have provided to them – with increasingly positive results.  Results from the 2010 festival showed that 100% of students achieved competency in understanding all water concepts presented.  For more information about the water festival and assessment analysis, see our 2010 Water Festival Annual Report.

Our funders and in-kind sponsors align their organizations with our projects because they value the development of achievable outcomes and the administration of an assessment program.  Experiential EE excels at helping organizations meet their bottom line through its outreach program.