Drawings to Help Preserve Wetlands | Stay Cool for Grandkids

Hello, this is Anna. I am an eighth-grader at Pacific Beach Middle School. Our school requires us to complete a Community Service Project (CSP). A CSP is a project you do to help your community. My partner Bridget and I decided that we wanted to do something with the marsh.

After brainstorming and bouncing around ideas for a while we decided on our project. It would be to raise awareness about the marsh by having students draw species from the marsh and write a fact or two about it, and then their work would be displayed for Love Your Wetlands Day 2022. We got working, and we began emailing some people that work at the Audubon society. They seemed enthusiastic about our idea and after finalizing our plan we started work on our presentation. The idea was that students could go through the slide show that had information about different species and the marsh, and then choose their favorite animal to draw. During this time, we also reached out to some teachers at Kate Sessions elementary asking if they would like to participate by showing the presentation to their classes and letting them draw. They all really liked our idea and said that they would give class time for our project.

Come late January everything started moving, we sent out the presentation, confirmed permission with UCSD, and collected the drawings from the kids. We were pleasantly surprised by how many kids participated. We had 97 drawings turned in! I spent the night of February 3rd putting all of the drawings in the sleeves, which took longer than expected. Then, on February 4^th, Bridget and I went to the marsh after school and with the help of some volunteers, we got all of the drawings up on the fence in time for Love Your Wetlands Day! During this project while trying to inform others, we also learned so much more about the marsh and its importance. We found such a wonderful community that all cares about conservation and protection of the marsh and other places like it. I am excited to hopefully go back and volunteer there soon.