Dig It! The Secrets of Soil Revealed!

I never knew… I had so much fun… I can’t wait to come back… These are just a few of the comments on the notes school kids have written and left at the  Dig It! The Secrets of Soil exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (MAC),  during  classroom visits from schools across the region.  The experience of visiting Dig It! has the same effect on older folks too, with "Wow" and "This is great" being just a couple of the more frequent exclamations heard in the exhibit. It’s not every day that one gets to visit an exhibit from the renowned Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and since opening in early February, the museum has been visited by thousands of schoolchildren who after touring the exhibit, which at 5,000 square feet can take up to an hour, head to an adjacent classroom where they participate in a variety of educational activities under the guidance of MAC employees and volunteers, including Spokane Conservation District staff. Science lessons have never seemed this much fun as the students learn about soil, (arguably the most important natural resource), while digging through the worm bin, testing soil ph, discovering soil texture and creating masterpieces using the art of soil painting. The museum was originally open to accommodate school tours on Wednesdays-Fridays, but due to the high demand, they quickly had to open time-slots on Tuesdays as well. The exhibit will be on display until September 22, and the museum is already booking visits for the summer and the first weeks of September. To ensure that any school who wanted to visit the exhibit could, the Spokane Conservation District worked with other agencies to procure enough donations to cover all transportation costs for schools to get to and from the museum. Those schools included local schools, such as Franklin and Windsor Elementary, schools from Medical Lake and Fairchild Air Force Base, and schools from as far away as Moses Lake, Idaho, and Okanogan County.  The students in the photos  are from the St. John/Endicott School District in Whitman County,  the leading wheat producing county in the entire nation.  Soils are the life-blood of Whitman County and Dig It! brings that importance into focus in a fun and informational format.   It's easy to imagine that among all the students- nearly 5,000 visited the exhibit during the 2011-12 school year; there are more than a few future budding soil scientists in the crowd, and even more who will leave a better educated and more responsible steward of soil.  We encourage everyone to visit at least once.  Can you Dig It?  We can!