Fifth-graders from three different Coeur d’Alene elementary schools explored their interests in water Thursday at McEuen Park.

The Kootenai Environmental Alliance, University of Idaho Extension Water Resources, and the Water Festival steering committee co-sponsored the first Coeur d’Alene Water Festival at the base of Tubbs Hill, thanks in large part to a $14,000 grant from the Inland Northwest Community Foundation.

Students from Bryan, Winton and Fernan attended the event Thursday and students from Borah and Skyway will be there today. Around 200 students are expected to attend each day, co-coordinator Gail Bolin said.

The festival includes five stations that each used different methods for teaching the kids about their environment, how they impact it, and why it’s worth protecting.

They demonstrated how activity on land affects the surrounding bodies of water with models of a watershed, which is an area of land where rain falls and then drains into water sources. Volunteers from KEA, the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, and a few other local natural resource groups lead the presentations at the watershed stations. They showed the effects of pollutants on land with cocoa powder and food coloring. Then, they sprayed water onto the model to simulate how a storm washes herbicides, insecticides, animal feces and other pollutants into a water source.

Afterward, volunteers asked the students to think critically about the demonstration. Jamie Brunner, Coeur d’Alene Lake Management Plan coordinator, asked the kids how they could go about their daily lives without impacting the lake. The kids provided answers in the context of the model, calling out solutions like picking up after pets and building fences near water sources.

Before the students attended the festival, Sharon Bosley, interim executive director of KEA, and Jim Ekins, University of Idaho Extension water educator, visited their classrooms to teach them about the watershed and the water cycle to prepare them for the event.

“One of the things we want to do is, hopefully, pull together all they’ve learned in the last year and have them see how the stuff they learn in the classroom applies to the real world,” Ekins said.

The festival not only taught students about the environment, but it also showed them the impacts a polluted environment can have on their lives.

“When we pollute our water, oftentimes it’s polluted forever, then people get sick and die,” Bolin said. “Good quality water is essential to good quality of life.”

Lake City High School juniors in the school’s “Outdoor Studies Program” volunteered to guide students to and from each station, while also teaching the younger kids about what they learned during the year.

“We followed the AP Environmental Science textbook, but we also learned how it relates to Coeur d’Alene, the surrounding areas, and our watershed,” Shealyn McCune, a junior from Lake City, said.

After the students completed the stations, they ate lunch and listened to stories from Caj Matheson, the Cultural Resources Protection Program coordinator for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s Lake Management department, about how the land formed in Native American culture. Then the students watched the “Birds of Prey” presentation from Beth Paragamian, wildlife ecologist and avian expert.

The festival took root near Sandpoint 22 years ago. Coeur d’Alene’s version used the original festival as a template for planning the event and organizing the kids. Bolin worked as coordinator there for five years, and is now co-coordinating for Coeur d’Alene.

Bolin credited Ekins with the idea to bring the Water Festival to Coeur d’Alene.

“We want them to understand that this place that they live in has all of these amazing natural features, and that it’s worth protecting,” Ekins said.