Fun in the Kindergarten

Abigail brought in a wonderful book about African Penguins called “Peter, Pamela and Percy in the Big Spill”.  It is a terrific book that told us all about how an oil spill can affect penguins.  To fully understand how difficult it is to clean oil from a penguin’s feathers we did too experiments.  First, we dipped a feather in clean water and looked at it.  The feather was dry and back to normal in seconds.  Then we dipped a feather in water mixed with vegetable oil.  The feather was very oily and slippery.  We tried to clean it in hot soapy water and after several tries it was almost back to normal.  We realized that oil spills are very dangerous for birds because their feathers cannot handle the oil.  We also realized that when a bird tries to preen itself it might eat some of the oil.

The next experiment involved our plastic penguin models from the water table.  With Amber’s help, we dipped them in oily water and then tried to clean them.  We used hot water, dish soap and a tooth brush.  It took several scrubs to get them clean!

Once we were finished these experiments we talked about what we would do if we were the captain of a freight ship carrying oil and we had a spill.  We decided the first thing we would do would be to radio for help.  Then we would try to stop the oil leak as quickly as possible.  We would also try and help any sea creatures  or birds that we could.  Finally, we decided that more ships should carry equipment to deal with oil leaks.

Here are some pictures of us at work cleaning the plastic penguins.