Understanding Pollution

During the last two weeks, we've been developing an understanding of the names of different types of wetlands, what wetlands are, and how they help the environment. What's pretty exciting is that our school was basically built on some wetlands (yes, that's been making us think a little bit) so we can go out and do some exploring in our own back yard.

After learning some metaphors to help us understand the functions of wetlands, we took a walk with Mrs. Towsen's class yesterday to look for pollution in and around our wetlands. Everybody agreed that we thought pollution was another word for trash so we went looking for things that didn't belong in our wetlands. Here are all of the things that we saw:

After we compiled our list we noticed that not everything on the list was trash. So in our groups we talked about what pollution might actually be. As we talked groups talked about other things that might be pollution like bad smells, or chemicals we can't see, or the cars on the highway right by Bear Creek. After about 10 minutes our groups came together, and we decided these were the characteristics of pollution:

Then we put everybody's ideas together, and our definition of pollution was:

Pollution is when you put something into the environment that doesn't go there and it hurts the environment.

Then we looked up the definition of pollution. If you can read the very small print at the bottom of our second slide, you can see that while we didn't use the same big grown-up words, we were right! Pollution doesn't belong in the environment and can really hurt it. Our next job is try try and teach all of you about wetlands and why we should try to protect them. Be on the look out for some awesome podcasts in the next week or two!