We would like to take our students on a field trip to the Bonneville Dam and the nearby fish hatcheries to give our students a chance to connect our classroom activities and lessons to a real-life experience. In our science/engineering unit, "How the World Works," students will study the myriad of ways in which communities manage water. The key question we pose to our second-graders is: How do communities, engineers, scientists, conservationists, the fishing industry and tourism among others, manage water? To visit the Bonneville Dam, we need to pay for two buses for the day, funds we do not have. Fortunately, the tour to the Dam and the Hatchery is free.

We hope you support us! Thank you so much.

Impact of visiting Bonneville Dam:
Our hope is that our students take action by conserving water, and become more thoughtful and aware of how precious water is. We hope to promote in our students an appreciation for the systems that provide us with safe, clean, drinking water. (Modern plumbing, piping, reservoirs, water waste systems)

Our goal is to teach our students how fortunate we are here in the Pacific Northwest to have ample water and that we need to be stewards of the water supply. In learning about drought and about children and families who do not have access to water, we hope to promote a sense of appreciation for water in general. We not only use water to cook, clean and drink, but that we use water to produce our food, in industries and to manufacture goods such as steel. At the Bonneville Dam, water creates electricity and helps with irrigation.

Additionally, as our central idea is "communities engineer methods to manage water" we want our students to understand more about the amazing engineering process that went into the designing and building of the BD. An interesting and often overlooked fact is that the Bonneville project was in part created to give men jobs during the Great Depression.