Rivers Days – Sample Day
Quick Facts

Full Day
Key Stages 1 & 2 (can be adapted for other age groups)
Science, Geography and Maths covered in the day. 

Click here to find out what you need...

A Journey down the River Eden (75 - 90 minutes);
A PowerPoint presentation which takes the class on a journey down the River Eden, delivered by our education officer.

This is normally a ‘put your hands up and tell me what this is’ exercise where the children are invited to reveal their knowledge of rivers.

It covers;

- The geographical features of the River Eden Catchment. What the words are and what they mean (using pictures); valleys, tarns, reservoirs and lakes, source, estuary, floodplain, meanders, erosion and deposition etc.
 

- Places within the catchment; the Lake District National Park, lakes, towns and places along the river.


- The habitats and the wildlife of the River Eden including food chains, the ecology and life cycles of certain species found in or on the river and top tips on how to identify them. 

Riverside! (Main part of day!)

The main part of the day is spent river-side and includes the following group based activities:

River Corridor Survey; a simplified form of mapping the river corridor using a key with map symbols to denote certain landscape features.  Pupils are encouraged to recognise the landscape features that they have learned in the classroom together with some new ones, and understand their implications for wildlife and the river environment, and then incorporate them on a map.

Flow rate; measure the flow rate or velocity of the river.

Plot a river cross section (weather permitting); measure and plot the width and depth of the River.

River Dipping; Find out what lives in the river.  Using nets, trays and identification keys the pupils collect kick samples of the river inhabitants and identify them.  Once identified using the key, the species found are recorded on a tick sheet.


Conclusion; Exhausted and wet we return to the classroom to conclude our day and using the information gathered on the Minibeast Tick Sheets we work out how clean or polluted our river is using the Environment Agency’s General Water Quality Assessment methodology.

And finally! the activities can be preceded and followed up using the additional information in the rivers pack which includes;
The River Eden
The River System
A Food Chain and A Food Web
Life Cycles
Facts about Water 

Curriculum Links:

• Sc2 Life processes and living things – Life processes 1a.
• Sc2 Life processes and living things – Life processes 1c.
• SC2 Life processes and living things – Variation and classification 4a b and c.
• SC2 Life processes and living things - Living things in their environment 5a b c d and e.

Geography:

• Geographical enquiry and skills 2a b and e.
• Knowledge and understanding of patterns and processes 4b
• Knowledge and understanding of environmental change and sustainable development 5a and b. 

• Ma2 Number – Numbers and the number system 2a i and j, 4e.
• Ma3 Shape, space and measures – Understanding measures 4b.
• Ma4 Handling data – processing, representing and interpreting data 2b c.

To make an enquiry or book a Rivers Day please This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it