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Stream Restoration & Riparian Buffer Lesson Plans

by
Sarah Brzezinski

More than 100,000 streams, creeks and rivers thread through the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Many of these streams have been impacted by people and are in need of help. Restoration and riparian buffer projects provide a great opportunity to engage your students in real-world service learning projects. These projects can help you get your students outside, physically active, AND learning about the environment. If you live in Maryland, you can even request technical assistance and apply for funding for your project through the Stream Restoration Challenge! Here are some great lesson plans, activities, and guides that you can use to help make your project a meaningful watershed educational experience:

  • Healthy People, Healthy Water – The goal of this curriculum guide, developed by project WET, is to make complex concepts of water quality relevant and meaningful for you and those you teach. The program offers 25 hands-on activities, an Educator’s Guide, testing kits, training, and much more. Healthy Water, Healthy People is for educators or citizens interested in learning and teaching about contemporary water quality topics. This guide has been aligned with Maryland State curriculum and environmental literacy standards.
  • Restoring a Stream – This activity is a part of Virginia’s Water Resources - A Tool for Teachers, and is a great guide for educators looking to participate in the Stream Restoration Challenge. In this activity students will research and understand the importance of protecting and restoring streams and conduct a focus project on designing, establishing, and maintaining streamside forest buffers. Students will then identify a local stream habitat in need of protection and restoration, develop an action project protect and restore the local stream habitat, seek technical assistance from local and state agencies, and implement and monitor their restoration activity.
  • Lessons from the Bay: Riparian Buffers – In this Virginia Department of Education Lesson Plan, students will conduct research to learn the roles of riparian buffers, build a watershed model to illustrate the role of riparian buffers in protecting waterways from polluted runoff, form hypotheses, conduct an experiment, report findings and draw conclusions.
  • To Protect Your Streams, Protect Your Mountains – Penn State University’s College of Agriculture developed this lesson plan to help students define key watershed terms. Through this lesson plan students will learn about point and non-point solution and will be able to how a healthy riparian buffer zone can improve non-point source pollution problems
  • Pollution in a Watershed – In this Chesapeake Bay FieldScope activity from National Geographic your students will be introduced to the role of wetlands and riparian buffers in the Chesapeake Bay as natural filters for sediment and nutrients that can negatively affect our waterways. Students will use what they learn about land cover and human actions to predict where pollution might occur.