Category Archives: Keepin’ It Clean

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Team Keepin’ It Clean Keeps Reading Clean!

  By mrs7124 • October 16, 2023 ,

Team Members (From Left to Right)

Emily Rivera – 1st year – Business Marketing

Madeline Leib – 2nd year – Marketing

Madelyn Sofranko – 1st year – Business Management

Mackenzie Sikora – 1st year – Elementary and Early Education

We all attend Penn State Berks! We are!

Our team is researching farm pollution of manmade farms and how using pesticides or other weed killers affect the water in surrounding areas. More specifically, we are researching how the natural-running water that we filter to drink is affected before, during, and after the process of filtering from freshwater to bottled water. Our goal is to educate ourselves on the importance of understanding how groundwater pollution affects our drinking water, and learn ways how we can work towards improving water quality one step and a time!

For our service project, we are helping a local middle school – The Northeast Middle School in Reading, PA – fix up their learning garden as well as helping their environmental club increase their awareness about local and global environmental issues. One of our activities with the students was creating a bat cave using scratch paper as they colored in stencils of bats. Another was a presentation about the process of photosynthesis. The students then planted seeds in little cups, and they will see them grow as time goes on!

Above are three photos from the presentation that a representative from the Pennsylvania Bat Rescue located in Reading, PA, gave to the students about their program and the importance of bats in our environment. They provide rehabilitation, care, and education for the conservation of the bat species. Keeping sufficient biodiversity is another important topic that everyone should be educated about, even children!
The middle photo above is a photo of us giving our presentation about the process of photosynthesis to the students. The others are photos of the students with their plants from our plant activity. We got natural soil without fertilizers or other harmful pesticides and allowed them to plant their own seeds and water their plants. We also took one home to track their progress.
This is a photo of the plant we took home, and what their plants should look like now!

Below is are links to our research presentation and service video. If you’d like to learn more about our research on groundwater pollution, give it a look!

Research Presentation:

Service Video:

Reflection:

Overall, this was a fantastic experience. We have a much better understanding of how our drinking water affects our lives. If our drinking water is contaminated, we won’t have any clean water to drink which will eventually lead to our downfall. Working with the students was an amazing opportunity and we learned a lot from the bat presentation. We were glad to see a bat in real life as well! We learned so much about how students view pollution and biodiversity as issues. Most of them didn’t even know what groundwater pollution was! The main thing that we concluded from this experience was that we need to conserve our drinking water as much as possible and farms need to refrain from using disastrous pesticides and fertilizers to grow their plants. We are very grateful to have had this opportunity to work together to educate ourselves about an incredibly important environmental and ecological issue.