Elementary School Curricula
Shared Waters
Shared Waters offers a comprehensive curriculum for elementary students in grades 3-6, aligned with NGSS and multiple state standards, emphasizing environmental literacy and sustainability. The Shared Waters curriculum includes 10 lessons, culminating in an action project, and covers topics such as understanding the water cycle and the concept of watersheds, conducting chemical analyses of natural water bodies, identifying aquatic macroinvertebrates as indicators of water quality, exploring the effects of human activities on watersheds, and developing and implementing action plans to address environmental issues.
Middle and High School Curricula
Watershed Awareness using Technology and Environmental Research for Sustainability (WATERS)
The WATERS curriculum is a free 10-lesson Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience unit that includes online, classroom, and field activities that utilize universal design for learning features to create a student-centered, place-based, and accessible curriculum for teaching watershed concepts and water career awareness. Visit the WATERS curriculum page to preview the unit, then create an account and start using the curriculum with your students.
Watershed Modeling STEM Mini-Unit
This mini-unit was designed to help middle school students learn systems thinking and geospatial analysis skills in the context of place-based problem-solving in watershed science. It consists of two interactive lessons where students use online GIS-based modeling tools to develop an understanding of stormwater dynamics within a watershed.
Mini-Unit Lesson 1: Effects of Land Cover and Soils in Watersheds
What can you do to improve water in the lakes, rivers, and streams in your watershed? Students will identify how land cover, rainfall totals, and soil texture affect evapotranspiration, runoff, and infiltration, and explain the impact of land cover and soil texture on watershed health.
Mini-Unit Lesson 2: Modeling Improvements to My Schoolyard
How can I improve my watershed… starting with my own schoolyard? Students will model possible changes in land cover and conservation practices on their watershed and describe the impact of these changes. They will design a watershed plan for their schoolyard to maximize watershed health by implementing conservation practices and land-cover changes.
Teaching Environmental Sustainability – Model My Watershed (TES-MMW) Five-Lesson Unit
Four TES-MMW activities and an optional pre-activity for high school environmental science are available in the Innovative Technology in Science Inquiry (ITSI) portal.
Water SCIENCE Four-Lesson Unit
Find this middle school unit at our project partner’s (Concord Consortium) STEM Resource Finder.
Navigate a Watershed
The River Continuum Concept was the first unified hypothesis of how streams and their watersheds function, and it established Stroud Water Research Center as a pioneer in innovative research. The Navigate a Watershed digital learning object brings the River Continuum Concept to life and demonstrates how the physical and biological systems within watersheds work together to create resilient, interconnected ecosystems.
Monitor My Watershed Lab Series
Please note: the following lesson plans are in development. More lessons will be added as they are developed.
- Introduction to Online Data Analysis: Teacher Guide | Student Activity
- Temperature Patterns: Teacher Guide | Student Activity
College Curriculum
Earth-Focused Modules and Courses for the Undergraduate Classroom – Model My Watershed
This unit in Carleton College’s InTeGrate portal focuses on the land-water connection and how human-induced land use change affects local hydrology. Students will use Model My Watershed to evaluate the impacts of human alterations to the landscape and investigate how best-management practices can lessen those impacts. Students will also be asked to consider the societal impacts of both increased runoff and mitigation measures.
