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WILL THE LEVEE HOLD? Students at McCurdy Elementary School work on building their own levees to see if they would hold back water or breach. Here, clockwise from left, the Blue team of Autumn Maclin, MacKenzie Sullivan, Andrew Carnie, Rasheed Mutan and McKenzie Cunningham immerse themselves in their team’s levee. These McCurdy Elementary summer school students learned about flood vocabulary words and they watched teacher Patience Edwards build her own levee before trying their own.

Potting soil, water and sandwich bags full of sand combined to teach students at McCurdy Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District about floods and levees.

The kindergarten and first-grade students in summer school teacher Patience Edwards’ class worked on a beach theme when students started asking questions about things they heard on the news recently, such as levees and floods. They wanted to know how floods happened and what they looked like.

First, Edwards reviewed some associated vocabulary words with her students.
They reviewed the definitions of levee, breach, flood watch, flood warning, flash flood watch and flash flood warning.

Next, Edwards showed her students how to make a levee. She scooted a large plastic basin to the center of the room and she emptied a bag of potting soil into it. She compressed and kneaded the soil, dividing the tub in half with her levee.

Using some Monopoly game board pieces, she created a town on one side of the levee and then she poured pitchers of water on the other side.

“I didn’t use any sandbags,” she pointed out to the students. She asked them to stand on one side of the room if they thought her levee would hold or to move to the other side if they thought the levee would breach. More students thought it would hold back the water and they were right.

Using three clear plastic tubs at each table, the students then had the chance to make their own levees.

“You and your team have to decide if you want to have a flood or a flash flood,” Edwards told them as she went from table to table and dumped more potting soil into the tubs. Each team also grabbed sandbags, which were actually sandwich bags packed with sand.

After she gave them their dirt and each team made a town on one side of the tub, Edwards used food coloring to turn the pitchers of water blue, red and green to designate teams.

The Blue team poured water first and its levee held. At the next table, the Red team poured in its water, which found its way through some holes in the barrier.

“Our town is floating! Save the dog!” Red team members cried.

The Green team’s levee also kept the water back.

As they cleaned up and came back together as one group, Edwards asked the students what happened with their levees.

“It didn’t breach and we worked together as a team,” said Blue team members.

“We had holes in our levee so it breached,” Red team reported.

“You made your levee very thin from top to bottom,” Edwards told the team.

“We kept smooshing the sandbags into the levee and it held,” the Green team said.

To reinforce what they learned, they had to write stories about what happened and why it happened with their levees. She also reminded the class that because Red team’s levee did not hold, that didn’t make them wrong.

“We should thank the Red team for showing us what a breached levee looks like,” Edwards said.

(courtesy of Hazelwood Schools).

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