In a normal year, Elliott DeLong, environmental educator with the Grant County Conservation District, would be teaching third-graders in Moses Lake about soil health and the water cycle today, an Earth Day curriculum tailored for Eastern Washington.

“But then it all went sideways,” DeLong said.

After months of advanced planning with the school district, all of those lesson plans scheduled for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day — today — were thrown out the window by the ongoing global pandemic, DeLong said.

With DeLong, the conservation district typically uses the eco-holiday as a platform for some of its educational opportunities geared for elementary schoolers, part of the district’s larger outreach to engage the public in environmental stewardship.

For Earth Day, those lessons have included Water in our World, which talks about the importance of the water cycle to agriculture, and Amazing Soils, a lesson on the importance of maintaining a healthy soil ecosystem, as well as the impact of mankind on both vital systems.

That latter lesson is specifically tailored to Eastern Washington, DeLong said, using wheat as the primary example for what soil needs for crops to grow and how active management can keep the soil producing for years to come.

Amazing Soils wraps nicely into the most popular program for schoolchildren that the conservation district runs throughout the region: Wheat Week, when DeLong travels to different districts for five days of lessons centered on one of the state’s most important agricultural exports.

While DeLong was able to finish most of his Wheat Week lessons before the pandemic led to statewide school closures, it did put an early halt to another of the district’s programs. Trout in the Classroom, a spinoff of the more common Salmon in the Classroom, has schoolchildren raise the fish for several months before releasing them in May, teaching them about the animal’s life cycle in the process.

This year, though, the fish were released in March. DeLong said he hopes the weather at the time helped the fish survive, but it certainly wasn’t optimal.

Beyond the basic disappointment of seeing months of planning go to waste, DeLong said he looked forward to the day — hopefully right around the corner — when the district could resume educating the region’s youth on environmental conservation.

“Kids are the most receptive group; they’re always open to most ideas,” DeLong said. “If we can keep that idea and direct it towards something where they can make a difference, like moving away from fossil fuels, cleaning the lake, they’re the group that is going to be the most receptive.”