In San Antonio, the first Saturday in March is coming to mean Get Outdoors! That’s the name of the event designed for kids and put on by the San Antonio River Authority at Mission San Jose. More than 5.300 children and their parents streamed through the ancient gates of the compound contiguous with the old church to partake of the numerous activities on the grounds. Whether they were learning to cast with a spinning rod, decorating a T-shirt with natural clay dye, or receiving a tree sapling to plant in the backyard, everyone was having a great day while learning how to be outdoors.

At the Whole Earth booth we showed off many of the science kits we carry, explained all about geodes – and then broke them open to expose the beautiful crystals within, and, the biggest crowd pleaser of the day: demonstrated how easy it is to pollute our water on a huge, scale-model of a local river system.  Shown in one of the photos below, our Field Team wow-ed the young on-lookers with food coloring pollution flowing with the rains right into the same lakes and aquifers from which our drinking water is drawn.
A special “thank you” goes out to the folks at American Youth Works charter high school in Austin for loaning us the use of their water model for this event.
It was a fine day to just get outdoors!

Posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 9:24 pm . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.