Today we wore blue and celebrated World Ocean Day! We started by joining a rockpool live session in Devon where we saw a shore crab, a sea anemone, a starfish and two different types of seaweed: bladderwrack and sea lettuce. Sadly we also saw a plastic bottle that had washed up.
Making turtles!
We talked about turtles quite a bit today and about how they often mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and eat them by mistake which makes them really ill. These turtles were absolutely delicious. We made them from pancakes, grapes and kiwi fruit. I am afraid they didn't last long and we gobbled them up for snack!
Jellyfish in a bottle!
To show how much a plastic bag looks like a jellyfish, we made a jellyfish in a bottle using a plastic bag. We added food colouring to the water to make it realistic. The best bit was giving it a good shake to mix it up!
We enjoyed listening to Nick Cope's Plastic Bag song.
Turtles!
Look at our beautiful turtles!
Time for an experiment!
We learnt how plastic is not the only way that our seas get dirty. To start with, the children played with some sea creatures in lovely clean water. We thought about how we felt and also how the animals might feel. We looked at the colour of the water and how we could see through it to the bottom of the tray.
Then we made the water dirty with plastic, dirt (coffee) and oil. We looked at how the water had changed and how the plastic got tangled on the sea creatures. We noticed that the sea animals wouldn't have liked it very much nor would they have been able to see through the water. We didn't enjoy playing in this water nearly as much!
Finally, we tried to clean the animals, but we noticed that they immediately got dirty again because the water was dirty. We could pull out the plastic but we couldn't get rid of the dirt or oil. We talked about how difficult it would be to clean a whole ocean and all the animals in it!
Dolphin food!
We enjoyed making dolphins. I wonder how many of them lasted until teatime!
We learnt how long different types of plastic take to breakdown and how we can all think about using less plastic. The children all took home a guide to using less plastic at home.