2022

Project Objective

To inspire children to become water stewards by providing hands on fun activities and resources at festival events and supporting school programs.

The Haliburton-Muskoka-Kawartha Children’s Water Festival (HMKCWF) has for 13 years, been an annual event which actively inspires and teaches elementary students of the region about water ecology and water stewardship in their homes, classrooms and communities. Teachers, classes, volunteers and both secondary and post-secondary students have attended outdoor ‘day camps’, learning via some of 40+ experiential activity centres.

We cooperate with other conservation organizations who offer research-based information and generally host a third of our relevant activity centres. Several activities involving resources and models focused on the connections between wildlife habitat as part of watershed ecosystem health and human health and stewardship have been developed with support of the OWF in the past. As more extreme environmental events related to climate change and water (flooding, droughts, storms etc.) are occurring, we have added, since 2019, content focused on climate change. We have also developed 2 educational websites and a Water Hero / Big Splash program in which students share water conservation ideas and stewardship acts in follow-up to the festival. Teachers and learners have drawn upon festival experiences and resources posted to our websites to continue with learning about water conservation and ecosystem health in classrooms and at home.

Due to COVID health & safety measures, the HMKCWF could not deliver in-person festivals in 2020-21. In lieu, we created “Water Week: In-Class Modules for Teachers”. This resource provided guidance, lesson plans and associated written resources for classes to still learn actively from school indoor and outdoor locations. We are further adapting this year to deliver quality experiential water conservation and watershed stewardship education to youth of our region, in ways that are following up on feedback from teachers and updating to pandemic realities.

We will again be hosting an in-person festival at the end of September for grade 4-6 students of the Trillium Lakelands District School Board. We will be extending the value of this festival, and its activity centres by updating our teachers’ guide, associated on-line resources and providing resource kits and supports for attendees of this event to return and share within their schools, through interdisciplinary units focused on watershed stewardship. We will collect and report on feedback of this pilot program to inform wider distribution of associated activity kits, guides and other resources within the local region through future festival programs and resource loans within the school board and with cooperating conservation organization partners. Support from funders such as OWF will be key in engaging with more than the 1000 students that we’ve hosted in 2 days of festivals in years past, throughout the year. Requested funds from the Ontario Wildlife Foundation would allow the HMK Children’s Water

Final Report