ALOHA!

We are 4th, 5th, and 6th grade enrichment students from Enchanted Lake Elementary School that is located on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. We are the youngest
group in the Global Water Quality Sampling Project, and very excited to be part of this project. We are going to call our project, "Is Enchanted Lake Really
Enchanting?" The lake, also known as Kaelepulu Pond, is walking distance from our school and can be found at Lat: 21.387076, Lon: -157.734973

Our first major activity was to study our watershed and storm drain systems. Mr.Bob Bourke of OceanIt Laboratories visited our class and explained what a
watershed is, and and how it can get polluted. He shared with us some of the water pollutants that can get into our storm drain system such as fertilizer, detergent,
animal and human poop, herbicides, oil from cars, boats, pesticides, muddy runoff, and acid from batteries. Bob Bourke even gave us homework to do. He gave us
a map of our watershed and told us to map out certain things in our watershed. We needed to find out where our homes, restaurants, grocery stores, schools, and
golf course were located in our watershed. We also had to find out how many storm drain systems were located within one inch radius of of our home on the
watershed map. The mapping activity was fun, and we located everything on the watershed map.

Some of the resources we used were the Internet (mapblast.com was super), telephone book, and local maps. We learned that there were 40 storm drains that
opened up into the lake and some of us had about 6 storm drains that could be found within one inch of our home. So what was the most important thing we learned
from this lesson? Everything that goes down our storm drain system can end up in our Enchanted Lake. It can even affect our coral reefs because out lake leads into
our beautiful Kailua Beach.

Today we received our Water Quality Kit, so we are very eager and excited to do our water quality test on Monday, November 6. We will soon be creating an
on-line photo album of our project. You can find it soon at http://www.k12.hi.us/~lkanemor/waterquality/photoalbum/

Aloha,

4th, 5th, and 6th grade Enchanted Lake Elementary School students