Fwd: Getting Muddy with Flowing Water

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Jan 7, 2024, 10:54:55 AM1/7/24

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From: Peter Kindfield, PhD and Nicolette Rodriguez-Moody from Field Trips for All of Us <peterkin...@substack.com>
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2024 at 04:01
Subject: Getting Muddy with Flowing Water
To: <jsc...@gmail.com>

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Getting Muddy with Flowing Water

Outdoor Activities for Kids and Adults

Peter Kindfield, PhD and Nicolette Rodriguez-Moody

Jan 7

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Note: This blog is a serialization of a book titled Field Trips for All of Us: Transformative Adventures for Children and Their Adults. Here is the preface. The first field trip is Taking Education Outside.

Introduction

As a child, I never missed an opportunity to play with flowing water. Living on the coast, we’d build berms to protect an area of sand from high tide (we were so noble, ha!). When we failed, we’d catch the high tide waters behind the walls we’d built. We’d construct dams and redirect water that had run off from watered lawns or washed cars. We’d also build dams in creeks like the busy little beavers we were. Little did I know, I was learning through feel and developing a passion for an area I would continue to study more formally and work with more pragmatically throughout my adult life. My early experiences with water have grown into a deep respect for how everything in nature, including water, is recycled! The incredible efficiency of natural cycles is very different from how factories work.

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Activity

Playing With Water Flow Around a Creek

If you’re fortunate enough to have an accessible, slow-flowing, shallow creek on your site, the following activities are fun and provide opportunities for kids to enrich their understanding of water flow.

At first, just let the kids play in the creek.
Do some creek-work. Engaging in activities yourself is a great way to introduce and model them to kids.
Dig little canals and build dams to redirect where the water flows
Make a bridge
Dig a hole near the creek
Pose specific challenges like:
- Get water to flow over there
- Get the water to pool up over there
- Make a bridge
- Get some creek water to soak into the ground
- Dig a hole away from the creek deep enough to fill with water
Ask the children what they have noticed about water flow in the creek at different times of year.

Playing with Water from a Hose or Bucket

If you have access to a hose and some bare soil, the following activities are also fun and provide different opportunities for kids to enrich their understanding of water flow.

Trickle water from a hose onto bare soil in an area that you don’t mind turning into a mud pit.
At first, just let the kids play in the mud.
Do some digging yourself. A great way to introduce specific activities is to just engage in them yourself!
- Dig little swales (i.e., canals)
- Build up little berms (i.e., long mounds) to redirect where the water flow
- Make bridges
- Dam up one of your canals.
Pose specific challenges like:
- Get the water to flow to that wildflower
- Get the water to pool up over there
- Get water to soak into the ground
Trickle the water slowly so it's soaked up by the soil and ask your child where the water goes. Then turn the water up and ask them to describe what happens.
Set up situations and ask your kids to predict what is going to happen when you turn the water on (or off).
- Place the hose on a slope,
- Place the hose above an off contour berm
- Place the hose above an off-contour swale

Nature Science

The water cycle is one of many material cycles essential to all life on Earth. As a predominantly physical cycle, it's more understandable than other biologically important material cycles, like the carbon and nitrogen cycles. Each step of the water cycle is a physical process. None involve any chemical changes. As illustrated below, the water cycle has the following basic steps. Water moves from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere via evaporation or transpiration. In the atmosphere water vapor condenses to form tiny droplets of water that form into clouds. When the droplets get big enough they fall to the ground in the form of precipitation. When water hits the ground, it runs off, pools, or infiltrates the soil. Once on the Earth’s surface again, the whole process repeats.

Let’s take a look at each of these processes. Evaporation happens when liquid water turns into gaseous water (water vapor). Water mainly moves from bodies of water (i.e., the hydrosphere) into the atmosphere via evaporation. Transpiration is the predominant process that transports water from the surface of the Earth (i.e., the lithosphere, the Earth’s solid crust, or specifically the pedosphere, the Earth’s soil). Transpiration is the one water cycle process that directly involves living beings. It is the movement of water through plants from roots to leaves and the evaporation of that water from the surface of the leaves. Plants lose most of the water they absorb through transpiration. They use very little of the water they uptake to build themselves. It’s hard to think of that water as lost because it is that loss that serves the role of a plant’s heart. As water evaporates from the surface of leaves, the plant’s roots suck up water through xylem tubes bringing that water up the plant. Xylem tubes are half of a plant's circulatory system. Phloem tubes make up the other half. They circulate nutrient fluids down from a plant's leaves to other parts of the plant.

The terms that describe what happens when precipitation hits soil are relatively self-explanatory. Run-off is when water hits the ground and flows over the soil’s surface. If not for pooling, our kids would have no puddles to jump in! Infiltration is when water soaks into the soil where plants use it, or it replenishes groundwater.

Those of us who use permaculture and other forms of eco-agriculture to tend the wild, as First Nations peoples have been doing for thousands of years (check out Tending the Wild for detailed descriptions of how the First Nations Peoples of the West ended and evolved with the flora), are very interested in reducing water loss from the soil due to both evaporation and transpiration. We lessen water loss due to evapotranspiration (the movement of water from the soil to the atmosphere due to the combination of evaporation and transpiration) by adding organic matter to our soil (see Composting and Deep Mulching) and by providing natural shade from taller plants for herbaceous and ground cover plants that don’t need a full day of direct sunlight (see Relational Gardening). We are also generally interested in reducing run-off. Run-off causes erosion and often leaches valuable nutrients from our soil. Tenders of the wild do, at times, use run-off to redirect water flow for irrigation systems. Finally, we are generally okay with pooling and sometimes encourage it by creating water catchment ponds.

Educational Ideas

While we find forced memorization an unnecessary evil, learning new fancy science words can be fun. Don’t be afraid to support your kids in learning big words like evaporation, evapotranspiration, condensation, precipitation, run-off, pooling, and infiltration. They often love the sound of them. I use the phrase, “can you say?” to introduce big words, as in “can you say infiltration?” While learning a new word does not imply understanding, it’s often a start. Nothing beats hearing a five-year-old exclaiming, look at that mycelium turning that log into dirt!

Sharing and showing kids the cycles that maintain our Earth, especially the water cycle, introduces them to the sacredness that many Indigenous communities feel every day about water and the land they rely and live with. Colonization has kept Indigenous and Aboriginal communities from their original roles as stewards. Without as much time or resources, and the addition of dispossession and marginalization in the dominant society, profit continues to override their management of thousands of years. Many Indigenous rituals and stories revolve around water: the Chumash’s Rainbow Bridge; Tlaloc (He Who Makes Things Sprout) of the Aztecs; the Maya planting maize (corn) after the first rain; Falcon (yayu), Crow (sebitim) and Coyote (esha) of the North Fork Mono damned the waters of the east and created the creeks; the numerous creation stories that begin with a flooded earth such as the Paiutes, the Inyo-Mono, the Kumeyaay, the Chumash, and so many more. Water gives us life and death. We need to respect the cycles that we depend on, for the sake of all life, not just humans. Communities to support and learn from include Indigenous Climate Action, Indigenous Environmental Network, Kua, Native Conservancy, Seeding Sovereignty, Tó Nizhóní Ání, and The Navajo Water Project to name just a few.

Wrap Up

Playing with flowing water is a blast for kids and those of us who have maintained our childhood enthusiasm. Playing around with stuff is one of the best ways to develop a scientific understanding of the phenomena we’re playing around with. In this case, the science of water flow and the water cycle. Water flow also has lots of practical and sacred applications. Those of us who tend the wild can use and support the practices and the people who have been trending the wild for thousands of years and the science of water flow and the water cycle to inform our techniques for working with water flow. For more information about cycles in nature, see Patterns that Connect and Observing Closed Loops in Nature.

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