Wild Things Environmental STEAM DAY investigation

19 Dec Wild Things Environmental STEAM DAY investigation

Wild Things Environmental STEAM DAY investigating the ongoing micro plastic disaster at Chessel Bay Southampton…..

This day was inspired by an environmental disaster Mrs Vowell had observed at Chessel Bay Southampton. Chessel Bay is a Wildlife Reserve on a river that feeds directly into the sea. It has 2 plastic manufacturing plants downstream.

The whole of the shore of the beach is covered with inches of nurdles and micro plastics. Local residents are fighting a losing battle against plastic pollution and the local council said that there is little legislation in place to tackle the problem!

Mrs Vowell documented photos and took a sample from the shore line.

The sample was sterilised in a bucket using sterilising tablets for 24 hrs, then dried and taken into school.

Wild Things class discussed what a nature reserve should look like and then looked at the photos taken from Chessel Bay. They had a very emotional and mature conversation about what they saw.

Their first task was to work in pairs to sort and classify a sample taken from the shore line. Each pair had a 60ml container of shoreline and had to sort it into 4 categories: nurdles (pellet plastic), other plastics, carbon (burnt bits) and organic (natural material). We then added a pile for polystyrene and unidentified!

The children were given tweezers to help with the sorting and were happily ensconced, using magnifiers to help them sort for over an hour!

The groups of materials that the children sorted were then combined and weighed and photographed and will be used as evidence to help persuade the County Council and environment agency to make changes at Chessel Bay.

We then went onto the Engineering task – inventing something that would help to collect the plastic from the beach, or collect if at source from the sea. The inventiveness blew me away, from giant plastic blowers, to plastic suckers, detectors and mechanised movers!

The final task was to write a persuasive letter to the environment agency, encouraging them to help Chessel Bay with the clean up, and then look at ways to stop plastic companies being allowed to spill waste into the ocean.

The children show real empathy and maturity in dealing with such important environmental issues and give Mrs Vowell

real hope for the future!