By Walter Yost

From fifth-graders getting their first look at vernal pools to high school students learning the intricacies of water quality monitoring, the Sacramento Splash program is an educational boon.
"The outside field study is extremely engaging to students," said Gwen Guest, a teacher at Carl H. Sundahl Elementary School in Folsom. "After studying about vernal pools in the classroom, they can go out and see it like a biologist would do."
At Mira Loma High in the San Juan Unified School District, environmental science instructor Cindy Suchanek said the Splash materials have given her students another tool for their award-winning Arcade Creek Project, a field study of the suburban stream that winds through the area near the school.
Last week, the Splash program opened its new educational center near Mather Airport in Rancho Cordova. A steady flow of fifth-grade classes from throughout the Sacramento region visited the Splash Center, receiving hands-on education focused on the Mather Field vernal pools.
On Thursday, a class from Florin Elementary School toured the center, peering through microscopes at aquatic beetles and water mites, looking at bullfrogs, salamanders and snakes enclosed in glass tanks, and utilizing a three-dimensional watershed model to study the effects of runoff on creeks, rivers and lakes.
Following the lab part of the field trip, students toured the nearby Mather vernal pools.

Josh Gieschen, 7, and Rose Driscoll, 10,
both of Davis, inspect samples of aquatic life
they found in the Mather Field vernal pools.
Sacramento Bee / Lezlie Sterling

Sacramento Splash is a science education program jointly sponsored by the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District, the city of Sacramento Department of Utilities and the Sacramento County Department of Water Resources.
The purpose is to help students learn the importance of water quality and how they can improve water habitats where they live.
"Life in Our Watershed: Investigating Vernal Pools" is the fifth-grade level curriculum, which includes 13 lessons and a field trip.
A high school curriculum, "Investigating Streams and Water Quality," includes three lessons and a laboratory experiment.
"This is an awesome pro-gram," said Ja-Na Castillo, a fifth-grade teacher at Florin Elementary. "I'm not a science person, and it's easy for me to understand."
Teachers say they particularly appreciate the scope of materials provided by Splash, which align nicely with state science standards.
"They're some of the best I've ever used," said Guest, who has been teaching for 16 years.

"The program is very teacher-friendly," said Jessica Hutchinson, a teacher at Cordova Lane Elementary School in Rancho Cordova. Her fifth-graders are growing vernal pool fairy shrimp in their classroom.
Like all teachers involved in the program, Hutchinson was required to participate in a workshop to better understand the teaching materials.
The materials were edited and produced for Splash by Eva Butler, Greg Suba and Carol Witham.

Yertle, the western pond turtle,
is one of the denizens of the
Sacramento Splash Center
Sacramento Bee / Lezlie Sterling

Suba, who coordinates the high school program, said Splash provides high school science teachers and their students with tools to conduct a bio-assessment gauging the health of a stream near their campus and to measure the toxicity of water samples.
Students, he said, spend their field trip as "detectives" on the Mather vernal pool prairie.
Last year, the Splash elementary curriculum received the 2005 Governor's Environmental and Economic Leadership Award for excellence in environmental education.
The Splash program is available at no cost to elementary and high school teachers at all schools in Sacramento County. Interested schools should e-mail the Splash program at info@sacsplash.org.
Teachers outside of the county are encouraged to download and use Splash curriculum from the Web site www.sacsplash.org.