Children soak up water festival

More than a thousand children attended the 12th annual Children’s Water Festival today.

The theme of the free one-day event at Aims Community College, 5401 W. 20th St., this year was “Water in the West,” and more than 1,200 excitable 3rd-5th-graders showed up to learn from water professionals around the state, said Heidi Musil, Children’s Water Festival Coordinator.

Jody Lehman, with the Denver Children’s museum, was one of those professionals who manned the “earth balloon,” shuffling groups of 25 kids through the interior of the 16-foot high hand painted inflatable sphere.

“I teach them about water conservation and what the water layout of the earth looks like,” said Lehman, 28, of Denver.

Students from Adams and Weld counties, excited to crawl into the earth balloon, learned that 97 percent of the earth’s water is salt water, while 3 percent is fresh water and only 1 percent of that is potable. Lehman made the point of how scarce water is from a global scale down to the local level.

For more on this story read Friday’s Greeley Tribune.