Recycling

Hello 2013!

What a great start to a new year!  We have been busy over at our house over the Holidays, but I took a little break from blogging our journey to enjoy some awesome family time.  Now that things have settled down, and we're back in our (somewhat) routine, I decided it would be a great time to pick back up documenting our adventures.

 I signed up to receive once a month science kits from The Young Scientist Club, and our first kit was all about recycling.  Great timing as our city is transitioning to a new trash pick-up service, which includes glass in our curbside recycling.  YAY!  What better way to celebrate than to have a unit study on recycling.  I was lucky enough to be able to book a tour to the City of Houston's WaterWorks education center during the week, which is all about conservation and recycling, so we included water conservation and education in our study as well.  I'd love to share the highlights of our fun week:

Day 1-- We learned the "why" of recycling and conserving.  The boys looked up the words, recycling, reduce, reuse, and conservation in their dictionaries.  Then, we read 'Spongebob to the Rescue' which followed The Sponge in his efforts to start a recycling plant in Bikini Bottom.  My guys love all things Spongebob, so the book was a hit, and started our unit study off on a good note.  We did two experiments today to cover the "why".  The first was included in our Young Scientist Kit.  We buried a little bit of plastic bag in one container of peat moss, and a little bit of broccoli in another.  We added some wildflower seeds, and at the end of the week (or two) we'll uncover our buried items and check out the differences.  The broccoli should start breaking down, while the plastic bag will stay the same.  The boys made their predictions, and wrote them down in their science book.  The next experiment dealt with water conservation.  I found this experiment on the Internet.  I started with having the boys take a drink of ordinary water from the tap.  Then, they added a level table spoon of sea salt.  We discussed that this salt was taken from the sea, where salt water, fresh water was located, etc and ended with why we couldn't drink salt water, or just take out the salt from ocean water.  The boys then tried to remove the sea salt from the water.  It was HARD!  And they only removed about 1/4 T.  Then I had them take a drink.  YUCK!  After that, we looked at a world map while I spread out colored noodles on it representing the water on the earth.  There were 97 blue noodles, which represented the salt water, 2 green noodles, which represented frozen water (both the blue and green represents water that is not available to drink), then I laid out the one red noodle, which represents all the drinking water the world must share.  We then broke up the one noodle, and spread out the pieces over the continents.   Great visual representation that really showed the "Why" it is important that we conserve.

 

Day 2 was all about the effects of recycling.  We read a story called Freddy the Fish, which is about a little fish Freddy, who leaves his protected nature area home and swims upstream.  He encounters many different pollutants and his water gets all murky and dirty.  Wonderful story, and the boys had a lot of "ewwwwww" moments while adding the various pollutants.  After that, we studied watershed's and learned about the effects of littering, polluting the land, etc.  The boys crumpled up a piece of paper to make a varied landscape.  Then, we talked about all the different pollutants we read about in Freddy, while we added drops of food coloring to represent each.  Then we sprayed our land with rain (water from a squirt bottle), and watched the effects as the rain ran down our mountains, valleys, rivers, and settled into the lakes.  We also read The Magic School Bus: A Trip to the Water Works, and watched The Magic School Bus episode on Recycling.

 

 



Our last day of our unit was spent at the WaterWorks education center.  What a great fun field trip to end a fun unit.  The people at the WaterWorks were great.  We started with a slide show presentation that really summed up everything we had learned throughout the week.  Then the kids got to transform into dirty water and travel through the water purification process while going on a scavenger hunt through the Education Center.  After that, we played a group game to show how everyone from every walk of life depends on water, and why we must conserve this precious resource.

 

Thanks for joining us on our fun week review.  I will gladly share my entire unit study with anyone interested, just let me know.  We also worked in several other books, and added in vocabulary, math, etc. along with a few other experiments like making paper, and setting up our recycling bins.