School Spotlight: St. Mary's River Project
SMRP, which stands for St. Mary’s River Project, has been educating students about the environment, the Chesapeake Bay, and its watershed for the past ten years. SMRP began as an initiative by Robert Paul and Chris Tanner, two St. Mary’s College of Maryland professors who wanted to investigate matters related to the water quality and ecological health of the St. Mary’s River and Chesapeake Bay. SMRP Education was developed as a stewardship component of this effort.
Through SMRP Education, teams of St. Mary’s College students go into local 5th grade classrooms to teach for one hour a week over a 10-week period about the importance of watersheds and the Bay. We cover environmental science topics that are likely to pop up on MSA testing, however, more importantly; it is our goal to make learning fun and foster a passion of caring about the environment.
Our lesson plans cover a variety of topics including food chains/webs, wetlands, submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV), fish anatomy, organisms of the Bay, native and exotic species, and pollution. We ask students to think of their own solutions to problems facing the Bay. As instructors, we are always amazed by the lucid responses by the students as well as their perspective on situations and ethical dilemmas facing the Bay. However, it is also clear that some students lack a lot of this knowledge, and have trouble verbalizing something seemingly simple, such as pollution. Thus, we work hard to think of creative lesson plans and do anything from rapping, dancing, or drawing to make concepts easier to understand. Even though ostensibly the purpose of SMRP is to educate the students, we learn a lot from them and have lots of fun along the way.
One of the highlights of the club is when we invite the students to come to our college to participate in Outreach day. At Outreach day, students get an opportunity to seine for fish, learn about oysters, tour our wet lab, and walk across a real marsh while learning about its plants. Beginning in the fall, we will start a new semester and work with a new group of 5th graders. Last year we were fortunate enough to work with approximately 200 students and hope to maintain the same interest in 2011-2012. We look forward to developing some new lesson plans and keeping our program strong so we can continue to educate the students who represent the future health of the Bay and the general environment.
Check out the links below to our club website and the St. Mary’s watershed association: