Intentional signage, featuring the beautiful illustrations of Jasmine Gutbrod, helps park visitors understand how floating wetlands work and why improving water quality through the food web and natural cycles matters.

In addition to launching the structure, New Urban Arts Knights Summer Program used the Floating Wetland as a catalyst to encourage eight Central High School students and their artist educators to explore the natural world.

For six weeks, the students strengthened their relationships with plants, bugs, fungi, water, microbes and more. This tri-lingual group met on Mondays at Central High School with their core environmental teaching artists, Jules Zuckerberg and Vic Xu, to explore the urban ecosystem surrounding the high school. On Wednesdays they all traveled by public bus to Roger Willi

Student’s initial drawings revealed distinctive styles; many burrowed into copying illustrations from their Pond Life book before becoming more comfortable drawing directly from life. The teaching artists used photographs, translation apps, and worksheets in Spanish, French and English to explore key questions. The students’ relationships with each other, their teaching artists, and the natural world deepened through collaborative drawings and daily journal entries. Drawing in the park became their favorite part of the workshops.

Students explored the food web using the Park’s unique education tools, including a visit to the Museum of Natural History Wildlife Room. The large, taxidermy animals focused everyone’s attention and drawing on the top of the food chain.

A short walk to Polo Lake provided an opportunity to draw and to examine microbes collected from the lake through a microscope and a dissecting scope, courtesy of The Nature Conservancy. A visit from author Kate Schapira extended that learning by guiding a session as students drew a big pond, embodied different organisms, and listened to their surroundings and each other.

The following class they collected their own water samples from Polo Lake using a technique called Baby Legs courtesy of Jeffrey Yoo Warren and the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research. Using microscopes crafted by Jeffrey out of corrugated cardboard, lenses, small cameras and lights connected to laptops, everyone was mesmerized by the microbial world revealed on a computer screen. The microbes darted, twirled and munched on bacteria, algae, and various plankton.

Building on the joy and investment they showed making their collaborative “Exquisite Pond” drawings, the group played “Musical Journals” for the final class. Sitting around a table each young artist passed their journal to the right, examined the drawings inside, and drew inspiration from one image to make their own drawing on a separate paper folded into 8 sections.

After journals returned to the original owners each student had eight visual responses to their friends’ drawings in a small book as a beautiful memento of their summer collaboration with the human and nonhuman world.

After a summer long of learning and drawing together and several weeks of designing, compiling intricate and thoughtful observational nature drawings, writing by students, and printing…our zine that we made together, Exquisite Wetland has been born!