oil spill

Video made by a child about oil spills (5 minutes)
BP Oil Spill (4 minutes)
Washing a bird (2 minutes)


I read this book by Melvin Berger. It's a great resource and explains very clearly what happens and what people do to save the animals.





Then we did our own oil spill experiment where we had to figure out what the best tool would be to remove oil from water.
We used: cotton balls, Popsicle sticks, Q-tips, paper towels, eye droppers, rocks

We started off by making a prediction about what would work BEST to clean the oil spill, and we kept a chart of our data. 

PYP Sharing the Planet

Our new unit for PYP (The IB program) is:
Sharing the Planet.

Our central idea is: Living things share natural resources. 

The first activity I did was to hand out a snack to only some of my students. The ones that I skipped were left saying, "What about me!?"
Then we talked about how that felt (and I gave everyone snack).

We defined our our words.
Resource- something you can use
Natural resource- from nature
Manmade resource- humans made or changed it.

We wrote examples of natural resources and manmade resources on sticky notes and talked about the difference.

We watched a video from United Streaming called Learning About Natural Resources. 

This video explained the difference between 3 types of natural resources.

Inexhaustible Natural Resource- Cannot be used up, will always be available (air, sun)

Renewable Natural Resource- Can be used over and over again (trees, soil)

Nonrenewable Natural Resource- Cannot be made again in our lifetime (coal, gas)

Here's a little youtube video talking about the difference between man made and natural resources. 

This is a great article about the causes and effects of pollution. 


Video about the 3R's.


Video about pollution.

Here's a good website for suggestions of activities go to along with the Berenstein Bears book about pollution.

Here's another website about pollution.