Wyatt Anderson, a fourth-grader at Community Christian School, knows.

“Their job is to filter the water,” Anderson said. “It’s a habitat to lots of animals, and then it stores water.”

Anderson, along with the rest of his classmates at CCS, became experts on wetlands — also known as marshes, swamps, fen, bogs and slough — when the Water Rocks! program came to the school on Monday.

Water Rocks! Is a youth water education program from Iowa State University.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert CCS students play a hopscotch game to learn about migratory animals and the challenges they face when their wetlands are destroyed.

Water quality and conservation educator Alena Whitaker and youth water outreach specialist Hannah Preston travel across the state to share lessons at schools and community events. They present a spectrum of conservation lessons on things like water quality, biodiversity, pollination and watershed. On Monday, they talked to the CCS students about Iowa’s wetlands.

“Today, our main goal is so they know what the jobs of wetlands are and how important they are in our ecosystem,” Preston said.

After a presentation introducing wetlands and their roles in the environment, Whitaker and Preston led the students in a hopscotch activity to demonstrate how the loss of wetlands affects migratory animals like geese. Preston would read a scenario — like wetlands in Iowa being drained to build a highway, or wetlands in South Dakota drying up because of unusually hot weather caused by climate change — and remove the hopscotch square representing that state. The students would then have to figure out how to hop from one end to the other without falling, which became more and more difficult as the wetlands faced more and more adversity.

“Iowa has lost 90 percent of its wetlands in the last 200 years,” Whitaker said.

After learning all about wetlands and their jobs in the environment, Anderson feels it is important to protect the wetlands that remain.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert CCS third-grader Annabelle Krog places a token on her playing card for "Wetlands Bingo" during a Water Rocks! presentation from Iowa State University Extension and Outreach on Monday morning.

“We should just keep as much water as we can and make sure that we take care of the land that we’ve got,” Anderson said.