Urban+Slobber+Memo

Thomas Sgueglia Urban Slobber Curriculum Review

The Clean Water Education Partnership developed the Urban Slobber module that is designed to teach kids about storm water runoff. Their mission is to protect North Carolina’s waterways from storm water pollution through public education and outreach. Their website if filled with information pertaining specifically to storm water runoff and water pollution. They believe that through education and local government action, the waterways of North Carolina will be protected. Their curriculum is designed to get kids to think about the sheer volume of storm water runoff. The first exercise is for the students to calculate the amount of storm water that one inch of rain makes on one acre. By a simple volumetric calculation, the kids will learn that the answer is 27,156 gallons. By relating this number to the gallon of milk in their refrigerator, kids can visualize this massive number. This module would not work well on elementary school students because they would need to know basic volumetric equations. The module is designed to work on students that have already learned that in previous math courses. After the students calculate the amount of water that is newly introduced into the watershed, they are told to think about the consequences such as 27,000 gallons of moving water picking up pollutants and dropping them off in the waterways. By teaching kids that impervious surfaces can mitigate the effects of storm water runoff, it provides them with a sense that the problem is fixable. The next step for this module is to calculate the amount of runoff from the school’s roof. This will bring the topic of storm water runoff much closer to home. The learning outcomes of this module are that there is much more storm water runoff then you would think, that it can be used to pollute the waterways, that impervious surfaces make the problem worse, and that this problem is not in someone else’s backyard. These learning outcomes are similar to the literary goals of the Sustainability Education course because they both promote the idea that people need to understand that their action or inaction is cause real results that effect society and the Earth both locally and in distant places. Additionally, this module teaches about specific points of intervention. It would be good for this module to add information on which could help mitigate the effects of storm water runoff as a result of cooperative action.

[] []