This month, Partners for Clean Streams brought watershed education to life during a visit to the Side Cut Girl Scout Day Camp, where participants learned how everyday choices can affect water quality all the way downstream to Lake Erie.
At each river, teams held a cup that represented their waterway. Along the way at each cone down their line, they drew prompts that described real-world pollution events—such as “someone used fertilizer on their lawn and it rained”—and responded by adding two beans to their cup. Each bean represented a pollutant entering the water system. Other prompts included native plants or river cleanups that could remove a certain amount of their beans.
As the activity continued, the goal became clear to the girls: keep as little beans as possible from reaching Lake Erie. This activity helped illustrate how pollution accumulates as water travels and how small everyday actions can add up across a watershed.
You can recreate this same concept at home or in a classroom by using materials like cones or markers for stations, cups, and small objects to act as pollutants. Create your own prompt cards to see how different choices change the outcome. It’s an easy, hands-on-way to show how everything in a watershed Is connected and how important it is to prevent these pollutants from entering our local waterways.