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This article appeared in our local paper this morning. It’s really nice to see homeschoolers portrayed positively in the news, isn’t it?

For home-schoolers, a place of discovery

Pocahontas State Park hosts programs that fit nature lessons

Saturday, Mar 08, 2008 - 12:08 AM Updated: 01:02 AM

Christen Miller (above), an interpreter at Pocahontas State Park in Chesterfield County, works with children during the winter/spring series of Discovery Programs for Home-Schoolers. Photo By: MARK GORMUS/TIMES-DISPATCH

By KATHERINE CALOS

TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

Think of kids running down a hill at Pocahontas State Park as raindrops starting to flow toward the Chesapeake Bay, and you’ll begin to understand how fun can be used to teach a lesson about the watershed.

The sunny-day romp was one of the ways a group of children worked off some energy and learned about pollution during the winter/spring series of Discovery Programs for Home-Schoolers.

Groups of home-schoolers have used the park as a resource for years by requesting programs that fit in with the children’s lessons.

Now the park is making it easier for home-schoolers who aren’t part of a group to take advantage of the resources. Programs — on insects, fish, a pond safari, vascular plants and nonvascular plants — continue into May. Previous topics included geology, birds, reptiles and amphibians.

A watershed, explained park naturalist Christen Miller on Wednesday, is the area that drains into a river or larger body of water. In Virginia, the land east of the mountains is generally in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Richmond area is also in the James River watershed.

To show how pollution flows downstream, Miller brought out a plastic landscape called an Enviroscape.

The home-schoolers sprinkled cocoa and powdered-drink mix on the landscape to represent soil erosion and chemicals. Bits of styrofoam became litter. Chocolate milk represented sewage or oil.

Then they created raindrops from a spray bottle and watched as the runoff into their lovely lake made it look disgusting.

A few preventive measures kept the lake cleaner on a second try.

Vegetation “planted” with sticky tape along the edges of streams helped keep silt from washing into the water. Fences kept cows out of the streams so they wouldn’t stir up the water and deposit manure in it.

Earthen berms made of clay contained overflow from the sewage treatment plant. Farmers and homeowners had learned not to overfertilize, keeping excess nutrients out of the streams.

“Let’s make it rain and see if it looks quite so bad,” Miller said. Even though “it’s not possible to keep 100 percent of the pollution out of the lake,” the modifications made a difference.

Talking about watersheds tends to make people’s eyes glaze over, said Miller, referring to her experience on summertime canoe trips on the park lake. She keeps talking about it anyway because it is important.

“We’re all connected,” she said. “The watershed is a way to see that connection.”

GB was disappointed that the photographer didn’t get him in the newspaper. But never fear, because MY camera was near. These were my pictures from the same day.

The kids run down the hill, representing raindrops converging on the lowest point.

GB was a bit of pollution within the raindrops

Here, he shakes powdered cocoa to represent soil erosion, and it’s impact on pollution. Other kids sprinkled red, powdered Kool-aid to represent fertilizer. There was also chocolate syrup to represent sludge from cars and factories.

GB produces ‘rain’ with a squirt bottle.

Here you can see the pollution running into the unprotected Chesapeake Bay.

This is how polluted the bay would look if there were no protective measures in place.

Thanks to State and Federal environmental protections, we have ‘wetlands’ (represented by the green felt) and restrictions on factories and fertilizers. These protections should help the health and safety of the bay.