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Classroom Activities:

Polk County Soil and Water District provides educational assistance for teachers in Polk County. Educational backpacks are provided for grades K-4. Depending upon the teachers curricular goals, these may be taken home or used in the classroom. Our education specialist also teaches a variety of classes for grades K-6 upon request.

Poster Contest

Each year students in Kindergarten through 12th grades have the opportunity to learn about our natural resources though their art work. Winning posters are announced on the local level, and county and state winners receive awards. There is a new theme for the contest each year. Classroom and Art teachers work with the students to help them develop these posters. It would be impossible to do this project without their assistance.

Water Festival

Richard McConnell directs this Bear Creek Project each year. Goals of the water festival project include introducing youngsters to Polk County Soil and Water Personnel; emphasizing natural resource concerns about water, soil, air and wildlife; and befriending schools and educators. The specific activities that are used in this festival vary from year to year depending upon available personnel. In the past the Stream Trailers, forestry, invertebrate sampling, water pollution, Water Olympics, the enviroscape, hides and hooves, and reptiles have been featured.

Click here for more information and photos of a 2002 Dallas County Water Festival.

The District’s education program focus is on getting soil and water conservation information out into the community. The best place to start with this education is in our schools. Programs are being presented to kindergarten through fourth grade at the Dallas County R-1 School District Mallory and Long Lane Elementary schools, and to the fifth grade at the Buffalo Prairie Middle School. A puppet program is presented to the kindergarten and first grade classes introducing the children to the Wormstead family, which consists of Winston,Wilhemena and their children Wally and Juanita. This family teaches them the importance of soil and water conservation. The second grade presentation is a puppet show featuring Sammy Soil Saver and Cathy Conservation. The third grade demonstration is how to create a soil profile using edibles. With pudding, cookie crumbs, M&M's and gummie worms the children can better understand soil layers and how important it is to protect and conserve the thin layer of topsoil. This is one of the most popular programs because when the demonstration is done they get to eat the soil profiles! The teachers love this as well.
The fourth grade is shown a whole-town model of a watershed which is called an "enviroscape". This teaches best management practices which can be implemented. The students learn how we all contribute to water pollution and how we can prevent it. Along with the enviroscape, a very effective presentation “A Drop in the Bucket” demonstrates how small the amount of fresh, usable water there is available. The fifth grade presentation is to teach students where some of the foods that we eat come from. We have a large wooden box that we have different type of grains in and we show them how different foods come from hard and soft wheat, corn, barley, soy beans, and grain sorghum. We teach them how important it is to take good care of the soil so we can have foods from these necessary grains. We also send them home with packets of educational material that they can learn from as well. They learn how important the farmer is to all of us as all of our food comes from the farm.
As in previous years we were invited to participate in the Veterans Day and Christmas parades. We are finding that the staff who participates enjoy this as much as the children who watch it and receive the candy that is given out.
We look forward to another great year of teaching soil and water conservation in Dallas County!

Ann & Debbie at the Veterans Day Parade	Ann & Debbie present a soil profile demonstration
Enviroscape Non-Point Source Model	Cathy Conservation and Sammy Soil Saver Puppet Show
Wormstead Family Puppets	Christmas Parade
For more information, contact Ann Thiesen at 417-345-2312, ext 110