One Plastic Bag

Did you know that there is a lady in Africa who collects old plastic bags that others have thrown away and turns them into money? We read the story about her today, it's called One Plastic Bag.

 

Here is our shared retell from the story ...

Afterwards, we created a list of things that we could make out of plastic bags ... 

get collecting old plastic bags to bring in, who knows what we will create!

Plastic in the ocean

Today we revisited the sea creatures that we read about last week and discussed that many of these animals have been classified as endangered or under threat. We watched a couple of short videos that Mrs Graham took while she was scuba diving and she said that she has been lucky enough to see some sea creatures that have been classified as 'under threat'. 
 
We brainstormed reasons why sea creatures may be under threat and then we looked at a book titled Plastic Ahoy! It was an information book about an area in the Pacific Ocean known as The Garbage Patch. It got its name because rubbish, especially plastic and plastic bags swirl around the Pacific Ocean and end up in one spot, which is harming and endangering sea creatures.

Cassidy thought it would be a good idea to make some posters so we could tell others about where rubbish will end up if we don't put it in the bin. We listed some words to describe what was happening to the creatures and how we felt about it, then created a poster to inform others and persuade them to put rubbish in the bin. Let's hope they listen!

 

Looking at other sea creatures

Today we looked at other sea creatures including sea otters, whale sharks, polar bears, dugons and the humphead wrasse. 

We read information about sea creatures and then recorded where they each live, what they eat, their lengths and an interesting fact about them. 

We discussed differences in their sizes and learned that the whale shark is as long as 6 or 7 tall humans. We laid out 6 (even though we're not so tall) of us to see how long a small whale shark was.

From the information we read, one thing we noticed about each of these sea creatures is that they may soon become endangered, which means soon we may not be able to see them in the ocean.

Whales ... the biggest creatures of the ocean

Today we read a book called The Snail and the Whale, it was a rhyming book about a snail that went across the world on the tail of a whale. The whale got too close to the shore when all the people were on their jetskis, then the whale got stuck on the sand (that's called beaching). Wanting to help the whale, the snail went to a school, into a classroom and wrote a message on the board saying "Save the whale". Everyone went to the shore and helped the whale get back out to sea. 

We talked about how sad it is to see whales beaching themselves. Many Preps said that they know this has happened on The Gold Coast before. Just last week a whale was beached, but luckily it was saved by being pushed out to sea by some people.

Afterwards, we looked at a information book about whales and we found out that there are about 78 different types of whales. The biggest whale of all is a blue whale. It can get to 26m. The found out the smallest whale is the pygmy sperm whale and it is 3m long.

We then put all of the whales onto paper with their length and measured them in order. Next week, we plan to investigate how big they are compared to other sea creatures. 

Today Preps viewed this short clip from The Little Mermaid called Under the Sea ...

That then lead to a discussion about what we know about 'under the sea', this is what we came up with ...

We then looked at a couple of posters and a book about 'pond life' and compared what was similar and different with ocean and pond life. We added what was similar and different to the venn diagram below. The list in the middle shows things that are similar in both environments.