Steamer
Trunk

Investigation perspectives: Interdisciplinary

Grade levels: Appropriate for all levels

The Steamer Trunk project is our most flexible inquiry project, and the focal point of the Mississippi Adventure 2001. To participate, just send us an email, with your name, email address, school name and address, and the grade level you teach.

Imagine carefully packing the most important resources related to your local watershed into a trunk, and  sending them around the world!  What would you want the world to know about your corner of the Earth? 

Open your Steamer Trunk, and youâll find compartments for science, math, literature, history, art, and  social studies.  As your interdisciplinary team of teachers forms to create a discovery plan, youâll decide  which compartments to fill.  The Steamer Trunk Project is flexible, and adapts easily to your individual  curriculum needs and interests.  As you study and become familiar with your watershed, you and your  students will develop, and implement a plan to improve, cleanup, beautify or protect your local area. 

During the project, students will work in interdisciplinary teams to: 

• Identify and define the boundaries of their watershed 
• Assemble a Steamer Trunk full of real artifacts that create a living profile of your watershed, and send it to a partner school.
• Receive a Steamer Trunk in the mail, and like watershed detectives, deduce the location of their mystery partner school.
• Create an electronic version of their Steamer Trunk 
• Post the electronic portfolio in the online Rivers of Life gallery
• Create and implement an action plan for a local watershed improvement project 

In the Steamer Trunk inquiry project, you'll find:

• questions to guide your students' inquiry,
• activities to engage them, and
• resources on the web

To view electronic versions of past Steamer Trunks, click here for a complete list. See if you can deduce the locations of these mystery watersheds!