Tuesday, July 27th, 2021
On Tuesday, we weeded to clear a space for a future reading nook at Scooters Garden of Hope. It will be called “Reading Thyme”. Ahmed used the weed whacker and the rest of us used loppers. Matt came after we were done, and we all went to the office to paint the benches and finish our designs.
Wednesday, July 28th, 2021
On Wednesday, in the morning, we went to our adopted river section from Milwaukee Riverkeeper between Sherman and Hopkins along Congress on Lincoln Creek. We played a game we created, called “bendo”. We had to pick a color and the color we chose was blue. For every blue piece of trash we earned two points and for every other piece of trash we earned one point. We split into two teams and whoever had the most points were the winners. Our end results were 734-721. Da’Janique, Nia, and Ahmed were the winners and they each received a prize the next day. After we finished the game, we walked on the bridge above the river and took pictures. Later on in the afternoon, we went to Estabrook Park. We measured water temperatures and captured insects to identify them. We skipped rocks. Ahmed had a high score of ten. We found crawfish, snakes, water penny’s, mayfly larvae, stonefly larvae, pouch snails, and shells.
Thursday, July 29th, 2021
On Thursday, we weeded and picked tomatoes at Maglio. We even got to try some tasty cherry tomatoes. Elias and Ahmed put tomatoes in a basket for a story TMJ4 was recording about Maglio. We put up the equipment, ate lunch and had a NASA training. During the NASA training, we talked about red lining in the city. We looked over a map of the city and looked over each part of the city that had red lining. The parts of the city that had the red lining were mostly in the inner city. The places that weren’t redlined were mostly in the suburbs. This led to places in the city having less funding and resources. Neighborhoods that were redlined are hotter and have fewer trees than other parts of the city.
Friday, July 30th, 2021
Photo from mmsd.com.
We brought a bench that we built and painted to the Nia ‘Purpose’ Garden. Shanece showed us how to identify girl and boy plants. We got water from a fire hydrant and from the water barrel to water the beds. We also picked up trash. Then we went on a field trip to the MMSD waste water treatment plant. We learned about where our pee and poo goes. It smelled really bad. We also learned that the pay starts at $35 an hour.