First, he asked us if we knew what a watershed was. We all thought it was a place to store water. But it turns out a watershed is anywhere that "sheds" water, like a hillside, or an angled roof, etc. To demonstrate, he poured some water onto the hill, and the water flowed through the "river" and to the "ocean".
After that, he asked us about possible sources of pollution that could affect the watershed and what they would do. We came up with a few ideas for what pollution could do - it would kill fish, harming the ecosystem and ridding us of an important food source, it would make the water unsafe to be in or drink, and some others. Then, we started thinking about possible sources of pollution. Dog poop (like humans but unlike other animals' manure, dog dung has a lot of bacteria in it, so it's counted as waste), dirt loosened from chopped down trees, herbicides or fertilizers, pesticides or insecticides, and oil from leaky cars were just a few of them.
Finally, we got to the fun part. After each source of pollution we listed, he added a bit of stuff resembling the item to the model. Later, we found out that the car oil and chemicals were soy sauce, the mud and dog poop were cocoa powder, and the fertilizers and insecticides were orange and green Kool-Aid mix, respectively. I didn't even know it was all edible (probably to keep it safe if one person accidentally ate some of it)! Anyway, each person squirted three times to stimulate the rain, and everybody had a lot of fun. A dog got "drunk" from all of the Kool-Aid - we made that up because somebody squirted it down, and it landed in a big puddle of brown-ish (orange and green) Kool-Aid and cocoa powder. The "fish" in the "ocean" probably would have died if they were real - it smelled disgusting, and the whole "ocean" was black and brown.
All in all, Nature Vision was awesome!
