Year 10 River Study: Karura Forest Trip

On Friday, 1st March, our Year 10 geography students headed across Nairobi to Karura forest to complete their first river field work study. This is a fantastic learning opportunity for them as a significant part of their curriculum is to study the features of rivers and the processes that shape them. Having been lucky enough to have the rains hold off for a couple of days, we were fortunate to have perfect water levels for some great field work.

Split into groups, the students’ study largely focused on the extent to which the river follows the Bradshaw model, in other words how characteristics change as it moves from source to sea. At each site, the groups focused on the main characteristics of the river including the width, depth, gradient, velocity, temperature, pH and bedload size. The data collected from the study not only becomes compiled back at school for our students to analyse, it is also sent to the team at Karura forest so that they may use it in their own monitoring of the rivers that traverse through it.

There were fantastic displays of geography fieldwork throughout the day, with students getting stuck right into the work and right into the rivers. Working together in their groups we were treated to wonderful displays of teamwork, with students taking on different tasks to make their data collection run efficiently and effectively. Energy levels were high and attitudes were phenomenal as our geographers gathered data with barely any delays. In the coming weeks we will take this data and begin to look at it in greater detail in class, whilst also evaluating the fieldwork skills themselves and bringing things full circle as we finalise our rivers topic in geography.