The Rouge River Water Festival is designed to help fourth and fifth-grade students learn about our most precious natural resource – clean, fresh water. This free program will help students appreciate the importance of water and how it impacts their daily lives. It also provides students with hands-on activities to help them understand water resource-related topics including ecosystems, the geosphere and the hydrologic cycle.

The 2010 Rouge River Water Festival at the Cranbrook Institute of Science will take place on September 14-17 and will accommodate up to 3,000 students. The Water Festival is a half-day educational experience for students from schools in the Rouge River Watershed portion of Oakland County. Students also will learn the central role water and the Rouge River play in the region. The

Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, situated on three tributaries of the Rouge River, offers an outstanding learning environment. 

Each class will attend a series of outdoor and indoor presentations. Presentations last 30 minutes and represent an interactive, hands-on learning experience. All presentations and exhibits relate to water, its uses and its critical importance to us and our environment. 

Each teacher will leave the Water Festival with a water resource curriculum guide. These guides are reviewed by local educators and water resource professionals and were developed to support state grade-level content expectation requirements. Each water resource guide is filled with ideas to further implement a water-based curriculum in the classroom.

Presentations offered at the Water Festival are intended to reinforce the current science curricula taught at elementary schools throughout the Rouge River Watershed.  The Organization for Bat Conservation will be participating by offering Bat Zone Tours that focus on animals that live rely on wetlands, rivers, and ponds for food, shelter, and raising young.  Live animals that will shown include bats, owls, frogs, and more. 

Thanks to generous donation of Critter Catchers, Inc., the Bat Zone tours will be offered at no additional cost to the students.