Change Is Simple

This post was written by Asha and Bea about an enrichment activity our class experienced last week.  Thank you to the two of them for an amazing job!
Today, our class went to the library for a program called Change Is Simple.  When we first got there they told us, "today we are going to learn about trash and the three R's: reduce, reuse and recycle."
After some talking about the meaning for trash and keeping our community trash free, Dom (one of the helpers from the program) told us we were going to learn a fun way to sort our trash, with a relay race!  Then he sorted us into five groups and dumped a pile of trash in front of each group.  

In the first round, we had 3 bins: trash, recycling and paper bins.  But in the second round we were going to get some more.  In the first round the 5th group won but put something in the wrong bin.  It was a plastic toy they put in recycling, but surprisingly it was trash because it had more than one kind of plastic.  In the second rounds we got a few more bins: the reduce bin, the reuse bin and the compost bin.  Those new three were so you could not have anything in the trash bin.  The 5th group won again but had a few wrong things like one item in the trash.  After that second round it was time to move on.

The next thing Dom told us to do was stand in a circle.  Once we got into a circle he asked us if we liked snakes.  Most said yes but there were some no's.  Then he reached in the sack he was holding and pulled out an empty water bottle then handed it to someone and kept walking and more came out!  Every one that came out he handed to someone.  Some people even got two!  They were held together by string, so he called it a "water bottle snake."  He asked us to guess how many bottles we thought were in it.  After lots of guesses, we dialed it down to less than 230 but more than 210.  The final guess was 220 which we thought was right but the actual answer was 228.  He asked us what we thought that number stood for.  Turned out it was the number of plastic bottles the average American uses each year.

We thought he was done but he had more!  He split us into 6 groups of 6 and said we were going to find Proctor's average.  First, we did the average for our class and Mrs. Gibbas's class (they were with us), then we did that for the other two classes in the 4th grade.  Then we found the average for each grade and finally found our answer for the whole school.  The final average was 49,248 water bottles per year!  A lot, right?!

Simple Machines Project

As a culminating project for our unit on simple machines, our class used our knowledge to create gumball machines out of found materials. Every machine needed to include an inclined plane, pulley, lever, wheel and axel, and a working set of gears. The groups worked well together and enjoyed this foray into the design and engineering process!