By LRWP Board Members Missy Holzer and Heather Fenyk

For K-12 students, there is only one New Jersey Student Learning Standard (NJSLS) on rivers: “Use maps to identify physical features (e.g., continents, oceans, rivers, lakes, mountains).” On Monday October 20, Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership Board Members Missy Holzer and Heather Fenyk joined K-12 educators attending the New Jersey Council for the Social Studies annual conference to lead what we hope was the first of many workshops to support educators and students in using maps and rivers to learn about, and connect to, their communities. We now invite K-12 educators from all disciplines to explore curricular materials we shared at our NJCSS2024 session, titled “Using Rivers as a Contextual Bridge to Connect K-8 Students to Their Communities: A First Nations Perspective.” A curriculum guide and all workshop materials, including the powerpoint, bibliography, and detailed teacher and student case study guides, are available at: https://tinyurl.com/LRWP24NJCSS.

This LRWP workshop for social studies teachers emerged from our own place-based, problem-based teaching orientation, and built specifically on our Spring 2024 volunteer eel monitoring program. We centered the lesson around a special case study: “The Mystery of the Missing American Glass Eels,” and also worked to support educator comfort with using maps, particularly topographic maps, as tools for student understanding of change to their local landscape over time. Our aim, as always, is to help educators use local waterways to connect students to their backyards, while developing our next generation of local stewards.

While it may seem unusual for an environmental non-profit to engage with K-12 social studies educators, the LRWP sees great potential to connect with multiple disciplines, including social studies, science, math and art. From the past to the present, and into the future, New Jersey’s waterways were and are vital to our existence. Besides being a continual source of water, our rivers, streams, and canals have implicitly and explicitly shaped our presence in the state. Drinking water, food, transportation (people and goods), industry, energy, and recreation are a few of the services our waterways have contributed to life in New Jersey.

Viewing our waterways from a watershed perspective that includes all the tributaries, rivers, and wetlands within a drainage area, connects communities to each other as much as they connect the flow of water from the headwaters of a river to the sea. Our Lower Raritan Watershed, its lands, streams, and the Raritan River, offer a host of case-based, problem-based, and place-based approaches to formal and informal investigation of these connections from the past, present, and future. The LRWP invites formal and informal educators to connect with us to discuss opportunities to partner for classroom or field based approaches to learning and inquiry.