Flagstaff Water Festival <\/a>a reality for over 600 4th graders. Under the leadership of Project Wet, and in collaboration with the City of Flagstaff, Coconino County, Flagstaff Unified School District, COE has been preparing teacher candidates to teach about water conservation. These interactive lessons based at Fox Glen Park provide teaching and learning opportunities about watersheds, water conservation technology, groundwater, and the water web.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRecently, Dr. Beau Vezino and Dr. Gretchen McCallister collaborated with partners to bring over 82 teacher candidates to the festival to teach from 3-5 hours of 30-minute lessons to 646 fourth graders. This involved over 30 local teachers from across 10 schools in Northern Arizona. Teacher candidates had the unique opportunity to connect with the community while applying the learning from their courses to teach hands-on, interactive science lessons. Not only were the candidates able to co-teach with colleagues, a key teacher skill, they were able to practice teaching with scientific models and leverage students\u2019 prior knowledge as they taught the same lesson every 30 minutes. This experience of teaching the same lesson with different sets of students across several hours gives our candidates a chance to hone and improve their pedagogical skills. Here is what some of our teacher candidates had to say about their experience:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Water Festival was an incredible opportunity for me as a future teacher, and it really gave me a look into what teaching science is all about.\u201d \u2013 Natalie Christofolo<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis experience was such a well-rounded opportunity for myself as a future educator to grasp different hands-on experiences and the ability to think on my feet. Each class was vastly different, and it was a great opportunity to learn.\u201d \u2013 Emily Anderson<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI had a great experience teaching science at the Water Festival. I learned how to engage students in a topic relevant to their day-to-day lives and encourage them to ask questions.\u201d \u2013 Grace Macior<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Water Festival was a very rewarding experience. Not only did I get a great opportunity to work with fourth graders, but I also learned a lot about water conservation and some fun facts about Flagstaff. One thing that I learned was how to get students excited. The energy that we gave them was received and given back.\u201d \u2013 Emma McCaffery<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Results from Project WET what is this? point to the importance of such outdoor learning experiences as the Water Festival in helping students early in their academics connect to important environmental, water, and climate issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Project WET organizers continue to appreciate this collaboration. They stated the following in their report: \u201cArizona Project WET\u2019s 17th Annual Flagstaff Water Festival was a great success. This was a spectacular collaborative day between Arizona Project Wet, the City of Flagstaff, NAU and the Flagstaff Unified School District. Your commitment with over 82 volunteers to deliver lessons and assist with the festival for our 4th graders is commendable and so important to water sustainability in Arizona. The Flagstaff Water Festival is a long-standing program in the Flagstaff community, and Arizona Water Festivals play an important role in water sustainability and stewardship in Arizona.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NAU teacher candidates build water sustainability and stewardship through Flagstaff Water Festival. For over the past ten years, the College of Education, and particularly our elementary teacher candidates, have played a key role in making the annual Flagstaff Water Festival a reality for over 600 4th graders. Under the leadership of Project Wet, and in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":776,"featured_media":11603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/776"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21425"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21531,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21425\/revisions\/21531"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/college-education\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}