Hamley Bridge Primary School
Hamley Bridge, South Australia

    As an English writing task, each student wrote a recount of our Waterwatch sampling day. From the students’ recounts the class voted on one student’s work to be sent to the Bucket Buddies’ site. During our sampling for macro-invertebrates our students worked in small groups. There were a total of six groups. The results which are found in Samuel’s recount are a total of the six groups.
    Hamley Bridge is a small town, located in South Australia. We are approximately 70 kilometres north of our state’s capital, being Adelaide. Our town’s population is approximately 600. The rainfall is around 430 millimetres per annum. Hamley Bridge is located between two rivers. We take our samples from the River Light, owing to ease of access for the students. Currently we are in our Autumn season.
    The Waterwatch program is a national program where people sample their local waterway six times throughout the year. We test for: pH, salinity, air and water temperature, turbidity, nitrate and phosphate. In addition, during each sampling day we also sample and record the different macro-invertebrates so as to obtain a pollution index and a taxa richness calculation in order to see how healthy our river is.
    Next term (three weeks time), as a class we will pose some questions with regard to what types of macro-invertebrates other classes in the Bucket Buddies’ program may have found. We will then look at the online data and undertake the writing of a  report.

Recount
By Samuel

    The Hamley Bridge Primary School 6/7 class walked to the River Light on Tuesday the 21/3/06. We had to find macro-invertebrates in the River Light.
We have a list of our findings below.

 The Waterwatch activities were fun because we got to wade in the River Light.
Below are some photographs of the location where we undertake the sampling. Click on the thumbnails for larger images.