, The Aberdeen Daily World 6/5/2001
SWISH.
No, we're not talking basketball. It's an acronym for Students, Watersheds, Invertebrates, Streams & Habitats.
SWISH is a project at Grays Harbor College that, with funding help from the Friends of Grays Harbor and the Chehalis River Council, teaches elementary school students in the county about the importance of clean water.
Nearly 800 students in grades 1 - 6 visited the Model Watershed at the college between May 2 and June 1 as part of Project SWISH. The five - hour program includes a tour of the fish hatchery, a hike around the Lake Swano Interpretive Trail and interactive activities simulating the life cycle of salmon and the flow of water through a mountain range. The mountain ranges are made from crumpled recycled paper.
"Sometimes the younger kids like to take the papers home and dry them out because they look like art projects," said the Model Watershed Program coordinator, Gabriel Cruden, who runs Project SWISH. "They take a felt tip pen and draw the ridges, then choose a place to put their house. When they've done that, a rainstorm comes along, in the form of a squirt bottle. The ink on the ridges runs and they can see where the water went. Then we look and see how their houses did, whether they picked a good spot or not.
"We use it as a vehicle for talking about things like erosion and how all the water in a watershed runs down to a common body of water, like the Chehalis or Grays Harbor."
Another activity, "Hooks and Ladders," simulates the life cycle of Pacific salmon.
"Students get to find out how tough it is to be a fish," said Cruden. "It's great for younger kids because they get to run around a lot. They go through a jump rope, which represents the turbine of a dam. Then they get to run downstream where other students who are predators try to tag them before they can get out to sea. During their 'four years at sea' they get chased by fishermen, also represented by other students, and they have to run across a field and get a token. Each token represents a year of life. Then coming back they have to do a broad jump, which represents going up a waterfall.
"Once they get to the 'spawning ground' usually there's only a couple left."
SWISH has been funded for the last two years by grants, and is offered only in the spring. Cruden's goal is to run SWISH and similar programs year - round on an outreach basis, going to schools in the wintertime when there's not as much activity at the Model Watershed on the college campus.
Cruden said the program is looking for more and larger grants, with the idea of possibly building an environmental learning center, which would make SWISH and other watershed programs a permanent fixture at the college.
"What we're shooting for is to create an endowment so we could run the program off the interest earned, rather than having to hunt for money every year," Cruden said. "We've been able to get by and do a lot on very little, but it would be nice to have a Cadillac of a program instead of the pared - down version."
David Wilkins, a Daily World writer, can be reached at 532 - 4000, ext. 123, or by e - mail at dwilkins@thedailyworld.com
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