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Data literacy is an integral part of overall literacy in the twenty-first century. After participating in a National Science Foundation–funded BIORETS (Research Experiences for Teachers Sites in Biological Sciences) program that emphasized the importance of data literacy, I was motivated to focus more intentionally on data literacy in my middle school classroom. Providing students with strategies for making sense of data is an important component of data literacy. In an effort to develop this data literacy skill, I introduced Slow Reveal Graphs, a teaching strategy that promotes sensemaking about data. By removing contextual information from data visualizations presented in textbooks and the media and asking students to interpret the information as it is provided, students engage in problem solving, gain confidence, and grow their computational thinking skills. As a result, students engage more deeply with the content of graphs and other visual representations of data. 

Building opportunities for students to interact with data in creative and novel ways builds curiosity, engagement, and data literacy skills. During participation in an NSF Research Experience for Teachers program, we focused on building our skills with data collection, analysis, and visualization. Dear Data was a key text used to help us explore data in a different way. In this article we provide three ways to implement Dear Data concepts in the middle school classroom, each with a different time commitment. We have found these activities engage students deeply, and the creativity of their work reflects this engagement. 

Freshwater species face numerous threats across the globe, including urbanization. Within cities in regions with drier climates, dewatering and channelization of rivers commonly occur and reduce or eliminate freshwater biodiversity. The discharge of effluent (treated wastewater) has been used to restore flow in some of these rivers, but our knowledge is negligible about how ecological communities develop and change in these unique but increasingly common ecosystems. In this study, we quantified aquatic macroinvertebrate community development in the Santa Cruz River (Arizona, U.S.A.), where effluent‐restored flow more than 100 years after the river dried up. We tracked community development over a 2‐year period in reaches where flow had been restored and compared those findings with data from a reference reach. Our study period also encompassed a massive disturbance where effluent releases temporarily ceased and sediment was dredged from the channel, allowing us to quantify the impacts of urban channel maintenance activities on recovering communities. Macroinvertebrate colonization was rapid following the initial flow restoration and channel dredging, with density and species richness values reaching or exceeding those of the reference reach within a few months, but community composition remained quite distinct after 2 years. Flow duration and the number of dry days in the month prior to sampling were the most influential factors in macroinvertebrate metrics. Simply adding effluent to dewatered urban rivers has the potential to restore diverse aquatic fauna, but targeted reintroductions may be needed for sensitive or dispersal‐limited taxa.