Posted by David Wetzel
Earth Day and Phone Book Activities
Ever wonder what to do with all those old phone books?
Earth Day is coming and a good earth day activity is to develop creative uses for these phone books, beyond just recycling or throwing them in the garbage.
Phone books have a myriad of uses such as shredding the pages for use as packing material, compost materials, and booster seats.
Phone Book Facts
Despite the increase of Internet based telephone number directories, the production of phone books is increasing.
Here are some facts to get you thinking about how important it is to recycle or reuse your phone books.
- On average, over 600,000 tons of phone books end up in landfills every year.
- There are enough phone books created each year to measure 106,700 miles when lined up end to end. This means they would circle around the earth about 4.28 times!
- About 80 percent of all U.S. paper mills use some recycled material in their manufacturing service. It is estimated that about 200 mills use ONLY recycled material.
- There are more than 7,000 different titles of yellow pages.
- 540 million telephone directories are distributed each year.
Earth Day Activities
Now that you see the current phone book dilemma, a good earth day activity is to find creative uses for all these unwanted phone books.
If just 500 phone books can be kept out of a land fill we could save between 17 and 31 trees, 7,000 gallons of water, 463 gallons of oil, 587 pounds of air pollution, 3.06 cubic yards of landfill space and 4,077 kilowatt hours of energy according to the American Forest & Paper Association.
Example Activities include:
- Earthworm Bedding - shred the white pages and combine them with dirt, which enriches the soil as the pages decompose to support the earthworm habitat. Do not use the yellow pages, because of the chemicals.
- Mulch - tear the pages out a phone book and lay them about 6 - 8 pages thick on top of the soil in a flower garden or among shrubs. Then cover the pages with a thin layer mulch. The pages will act as shield to prevent grass from growing through the mulch. Also the phone book pages will decompose and enrich the soil over time.
- Booster Seat - use fabric to cover phone books, sealing the seams with fabric glue or needle and thread. This keeps the phone books from sliding around as kids wiggle around on them.
- Packing Material - shred phone book pages for use in packaging instead of using packing peanuts. Shredded phone book pages are biodegradable and packing peanuts are not.
Your Turn - Share your ideas for additional uses of these relics of the past.
Additional Resources for Earth Day 2010
Modeling the Earth’s Atmosphere
Creating a Nature Journal
Global Warming Science Projects
Climate Change
Posted by David Wetzel
Colors of the Rainbow
A common question every parent and teacher has heard from children at some point — Why is the sky blue?
Learning the correct answer is important. Because once children hear an answer several times, right or wrong, this answer becomes embedded in their brain.
Convincing them otherwise, especially if they learned the wrong answer, takes a lot of evidence to undo this misconception.
Why the Sky is Blue? - Common Answers
Children come up with a variety of answers when asked why the sky is blue.
Their answers reflect what they hear from peers, parents, and movies or television.
Here are a few common answers children give:
- The sunlight reflects off the oceans.
- The sky is blue because it is the bottom of space.
- Because of all the water in the sky.
- The sky reflects off the top of clouds which contain water.
The sky appears blue because the molecules of air in the upper atmosphere scatter the blue waves of light more than the other colors as sunlight passes.
This answer will illicit another response from children –- But light is clear because you do not look blue!
It is true light is clear, because of all the colors which make up sunlight. At this point, children will want proof.
This can be proved by using a prism to separate the clear sunlight into the colors of the rainbow – ROYGBIV.
Connecting the prism and wavelengths is important to understanding why the sky is blue.
Children need this evidence to support internalization of the new information they just learned about sunlight and why the sky is blue.
You may have probably predicted the next question children will ask.
This question is — Why isn’t the sky red, yellow, orange, green, etc.?
This is typical and expected from children who are now questioning the evidence being presented to them. They are conducting inquiry-based science.
Additional Resource
For more about inquiry-based science visit Understanding Science Inquiry.
Posted by David Wetzel
Using Technology in the Classroom
As many of you may have discovered, I also found that many of my previous colleagues have little use for technology for teaching.
They are mired in excuses such as using technology is cheating, students learn best through lecture, the stresses of NCLB makes it too difficult to do anything but have students memorize facts to pass the tests, etc.
So what are the advantages of technology?
Technology has tremendous power to help students obtain, organize, manipulate, and display information. Students can use technology tools (such as word processing, database, design, and graphing software) in the same ways as do professional scientists and mathematicians.
Using technology for meaningful activities also helps integrate a variety of disciplines, more closely resembling activities that people undertake in the world beyond the classroom. For example, word processing is a real-world technology that can help students develop better writing and thinking skills.
Using the computer, students write longer, more complex sentences and are more willing to revise and edit their work; they are able to concentrate on the thoughts they want to express rather than the mechanical skills of penmanship, spelling, and grammar.
Using technology in science and math class promotes learning activities in which students work in small groups rather than in isolation or as a whole class demonstrations. The technologies used in the classroom are not those designed explicitly to teach basic skills, but rather are real-world applications that support research, design, analysis, composition, and communication.
For example using Google Docs to collaborate on science laboratory reports, data analysis, and presentation of findings.
Another example is using classroom Wikis in Science and Math for collaborating on projects and sharing their findings.
A third example is use Twitter or Skype to communicate with students in other locations to collaborate on projects and assignments.
An Example of Teacher Resistance
Three years ago I was hired by a school district to teach middle school science teachers how to integrate Calculator Based Laboratory (CBL) Probeware in their curriculum.
After four weeks of providing staff development and in-class support regarding how to use these data loggers, with the eight science teachers in the school. The science teachers began to come up with strategies and techniques on their own for integrating CBL Probeware data loggers in their lessons.
At the same time all the teachers confided in me that they had all agreed in advance that using this technology was a waste of time and that they would resist every step of the way.
I was taking back by this statement, I thought that the integration difficulties in their lessons were due to not understanding the technology.
Their minds were changed as they discovered their students were more interested in science experiments, grasped the technology quickly, better understood concepts, and were able to make connections with other concepts. The teachers also found out that they were not behind in their curriculum and students scored better, on average, on chapter tests.
Fast forward to today, CBL Probeware has expanded to all areas of the science curriculum and has also moved into the math curriculum in selected areas as real-time data loggers.
So What Does This All Mean?
Students today are more technologically literate than many of their teachers. Today’s students have grown up in the digital age; they use Facebook, they Tweet, and they use the Internet for almost everything.
Instead of resisting technology, the goal should be to harness the technological energy in students and become a guide for the best ways to use technology to learn.
Any suggestions?
David R. Wetzel, Ph.D.
