The view from Denise!

WOW!!  We have been really busy with JDLA Water Festival business these last weeks.  Each of the three groups that will be presenting have been working hard.  We will have Gooey Garbage - Jon's group about landfills, Water Olympics - about the properties of water with hands on action games and Bring Your Own Bag - about why plastic bags are bad for the environment (please note:  paper bags are even worse!)  My group is the "organize and shlep" group.  Weedwhacking, painting, lifting and hauling are a big part of the Water Festival.  We also made the schedule and map of our rotation.  Each group is pretty close to ready but we have no more Friday's before the Festival so we will take time out from class once this week 9/22 and once next week 9/29 to practice and refine. 

Our Service Learning class is busy getting ready to visit and present Bring Your Own Bag at the Topeka Water Festival.  We will do ten presentations to approximately 250 fourth graders!  Each presentation is only 20 minutes long and our hands on component is them decorating their very own bag.  Should be pretty fun.  We decided to divide our group of 4 students into two so that we can tag team our presentations and explore the fest on our down time.  There are going to be 33 different stations so we will get to see some new things. 

The Monday Minutes written by Jon and Robby reference our last Friday's activity.  The fish guy is actually the Fish Biologist from the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks.  TJ or Kirk is pretty awesome.  He really engages his audience regardless of age with his knowledge about fish and the environment.  He will be one of the special presenters at the JDLA festival but I really wanted the JDLA students to have the chance to meet him and hear his presentation.  They all seemed to be pretty interested in it.  He described not only the fish that we were finding but his own story of finding his professional niche'.  TJ explained that when he graduated from high school he headed out to K-State to major in Engineering but he didn't do too well in school because he spent all his time hunting and fishing.  After a look at the K-State catalog, he decided that it would be better to do something that he really liked to do.  What an excellent message to the JDLA students!  Do what you love as your job and you will have a better chance at being happy in life! 

SO.... all the service learning projects are currently being juggled effectively.  Most of the time anyway, each day is a day filled with multi-tasking and busyness but we are all learning as we go!! 

Denise