We have a adopted part of Piliokahe Beach which is where we have gone to do some planting and weed work. We were split into two groups, one had to remove or weed the invasive plants that were there, and the other group had to plant the Native plants. It was a lot of work and really hot but we managed to pull through and did a very good job. After that, it was time for a quick game. The object of the game was to pick up any type of rubbish and collect all the data on a piece of paper to see how much rubbish was found. There was mostly Plastic .
After that, it was time to head back up to Palehua to do some Nursery work with Uncle Anu's wife, Maka. She had us plant some baby plants into small containers and take out some of the seeds to plant. We also got to see all of her experiments of her plants that were planted all differently. And it shows which one is working and which is not due to the growth of the plant and most of these plants were planted from months ago. It was really educating and learned some useful information in planting.
After that, it was time to head back up to Palehua to do some Nursery work with Uncle Anu's wife, Maka. She had us plant some baby plants into small containers and take out some of the seeds to plant. We also got to see all of her experiments of her plants that were planted all differently. And it shows which one is working and which is not due to the growth of the plant and most of these plants were planted from months ago. It was really educating and learned some useful information in planting.
There may be a math lesson for this particular activity that you might consider for the future. Consider if students worked a piece of beach and came up with different kinds of non-natural things they found. By collecting data on this, students could extrapolate how much trash there are on the entire island by trash type using linear equations and extrapolating the amount by looking at the entire coastline of the island as a point on the domain of equations developed from the specific area of the beach. They could take this information and understand the importance of trash collection, and compare the amount of trash on the beaches with the amount of space available in our landfills. It will be staggering. You would need to consider the beach area a nice "average" of both crowded and empty beaches around the island, or come up with some kind of fuzzy logic for how well that beach represents all the beaches around the island.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of lesson should be fairly easy for any math teacher to write -- you would just need to provide some basic info on what kinds of materials students might collect when doing the "fun" cleanup activity.