Activity: Oil Spills and Animals



Activity: Oil Spills and Animals

Materials:

Small, flat waterproof plates – 1 per kid

1 large tray of water per table

Oil- enough for 1 large portion cup per table

1 large portion cup per table

paper towels

dish soap

bird feathers

pitchers – 2

spoons – 2 per table

What You Do:

1. Before class, fill the large trays with water and set them aside. You might want to put some cardboard under them, so they will be easier to support as you lift them to the tables later.

2. Fill up the small plates with water, 1 per kid.

3. Give each student a bird feather and have them dip in the plate of water. Have them note how the feathers repel water, allowing it to float.

4. Ask the kids what they think will happen if you add a few drops of oil to the plates of water. Will they mix or separate from each other?

5. After they make a prediction, have the kids drop about teaspoon of oil into their plate of water.

6. Ask them to observe and describe what happens. Note that oil separates and sits on top of the water. This is particularly dangerous for the majority of sea life which lives near the ocean's surface, especially birds.

7. Now have them dip their feathers in the oil water. What happens to the feather?

8. Have students try gently swishing their feather in the large tray of clean water provided for the table. What happens? It should sink to the bottom of the pan because the oily feather can no longer repel water. This is one of the ways oil spills affect marine wildlife.

9. Have the kids pretend the water in the bowl is the ocean and the oil is from an oil tanker spill. Ask them how they would go about “cleaning up” the water.

10. Next, test to see what happens when a few drops of dish soap are added to the oil and water. (The soap breaks it up at first, then just mixes it all together.)

11. Discuss how the oil and water experiment demonstrates what happens when there is an oil spill in the ocean. How are spills really cleaned up? Often, spills are cleaned with bacteria that break up the oil and kills the toxins.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download