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SIERRA VISTA — Pretending to be a water molecule can be fun, according to fourth-grade students at the fifth annual water festival at Veterans’ Memorial Park on Friday.
About 550 fourth-grade students from across Sierra Vista and Fort Huachuca attended the event as part of National Water Education Day. Like most festivals, this one had many games.
At a groundwater station led by Kim McReynolds, of the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, students started out using their imaginations to picture what happens to rain.
“Imagine you are at home in the summer and you’re sitting in your living room, looking out the window,” as dark clouds assemble in the sky above, McReynolds said. “Then all of a sudden it starts raining really, really hard.”
  
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Students said they could picture the water going down into sewers, a wash, their neighbors yards and forming puddles.
Besides making the air smell good, as one student said, the imaginary rain soaked into the ground, forming groundwater.
And groundwater forms the aquifer, McReynolds said. Aquifers don’t store water like a lake, she said. They are more like a sponge, which students demonstrated for the class by pouring water over a sponge.
Blake Wojcik, 9, and the rest of Sarah Meeker’s fourth-grade class from Huachuca Mountains Elementary School, knew that groundwater is one of the sources of drinking water.
Meeker’s class and others at the festival also took tests before and after the festival to test their water knowledge. Meeker was confident they would improve upon their test scores after the activities.
“I’ve learned a lot,” Wojcik said. “Like how fast it takes to get through different types of ground.”
McReynolds also had students test the permeability of different types of ground surfaces: Gravel, sand and clay.
Water poured over the gravel was passed through in a couple seconds but the water took about 21 seconds to pass through the sand. The clay was still holding the water after four minutes and counting.
At another activity, Rob Yancey helped teach Imagine Charter School’s students that water hasn’t always been available from a faucet.
“It’s pretty spiffy but it wasn’t always that easy,” he said.
After students shared the ways they used water that day, they heard about the days when washboards were used to wash clothes, when families had to share bath water and windmills powered well pumps.
Then students got to practice some old-fashioned water fetching with a relay race. The fourth-graders carried a water pail from one container to another, trying hard not to spill a drop.
Students were led on the “incredible trip through the water cycle” by Fort Huachuca hydrologist Tom Runyon.
“You’re remaking the water cycle and moving though the environments to all the different places we find water,” he said.
As water molecules, students became animals, glaciers, clouds, plants, rivers, oceans and groundwater. At each stop, they picked up a bead to remember their journey.
“It’s educational but it gets them outside of the classroom,” McReynolds said.
Volunteers from Fort Huachuca, the UA Cooperative Extension, Rotarians and others put on the event with the help of many sponsors.
The water festival is a part of Arizona Project WET. WET stands for Water Education for Teachers.
Herald/Review reporter Laura Ory can be reached at 515-4683 or by e-mail at laura.ory@svherald.com.
