On Monday this week, our excursion to Brown’s Bay was back on! The 5/6/7s enjoyed a tremendous day at the beach. The students all had a lot of fun whilst doing their bit for the environment and consolidating their Science learning.
Since the start of the year, we have been focusing on the ocean and its importance to humans. We’ve explored the mechanisms of ocean currents, the impact that the ocean has on climate, and the impact that Climate Change is having and will likely have on the ocean and therefore on all humans in the future. The ocean as a habitat is our current line of inquiry.
So this Beach Clean Up excursion, which we were fortunate enough to organise with the support of the Department of Natural Resources, was a great way to put our learning into a local context and do our bit to help out. Tania Rajic from the Department was an excellent source of information about the impact of plastic on ocean pollution. She taught us a little about the Bonney Upwelling, a local current responsible for the rich marine life in our region and provided us with all the equipment we needed for the day.
Armed with protective gloves and rubbish and recycling bags, the students hunted for rubbish on the beach, which they sorted into categories and diligently recorded on data sheets:
Kimberly, Amelia and Jorja M busy recording the types of rubbish they found on the beach.
The data will be uploaded by the students onto the Tangaroa Blue website, an Australian organisation that collects information about marine debris in order to try and find solutions to this problem. 
Tania set a challenge to the students whilst on our walk back, to find some fake red-capped plover eggs that she’d placed in a secret spot… 
The 5/6/7s found the eggs, but they needed to look carefully in order not to step on the precious objects!
After weighing our rubbish bags (in excess of 40 kilograms of rubbish were collected!), we moved on to a bird hide (where humans hide, not birds) at Eight Mile Creek.
We finished with a final spot of beach cleaning. 
Shaunn and Brad celebrated with an imaginary drink of Coke from these lovely natural sea-weedy cups!
After a long day during which more than 40 kilograms of rubbish were picked up and transported back to Tania’s ute, and more than 11,000 steps were trudged along the sandy beaches, we came back to school where we were treated to a delicious drink of hot chocolate topped with marshmallows…
If you’d like to learn more about the impact that plastic pollution is having on our environment, here’s a link to a very interesting talk from Radio National which we listened to last week, prior to going on our excursion: click here.