Craft Coral Reef

I haven't been blogging as much recently because I've been so involved with the Healing Oceans Together (H2O) environmental education and awareness group that my son is helping to organize.  (Regular readers of this blog may remember the Great Sea Slug Beauty Contest that H2O ran earlier this year.)

Now the group has moved on from raising awareness about sea slugs to encouraging people to help save the rapidly-disappearing coral reefs.  The first step in the process is that H2O is creating a community-based Craft Coral Reef to exhibit at ChambersArts, an art gallery in downtown Cary.  This artistic version of a coral reef, which will incorporate crochet and knitting, origami, beading, and other crafts, is supposed to remind people of the precious beauty of the coral reefs, educate them about the important role they play in our ocean ecology, and inspire them to take actions to help protect and preserve them.

We've been holding a series of FREE public workshops to get other people crocheting and crafting along with our group and contributing to the growing reef.  So far we've held three public workshops, and the results have been great.

Before launching the project, H2O crocheted some sample creations to show people:

But a few weeks later, after the second public workshop, the Craft Coral Reef had grown to this:

Beautiful--and exciting to see the progress!

For more information on this project, including some photos from the workshops we've held, check out the complete write-up on the Healing Oceans Together blog.  

You can follow that blog if you are really interested.  I'll also post some more photo updates to show you how our community Coral Reef grows.

Finally, next week we are launching another exciting initiative related to our "Save the Corals" campaign.  So stay tuned for that announcement!

Curriculum Resource: How We Use Energy

About 60 years ago, the average American produced about 4 metric tons of carbon dioxide due to the energy s/he used.  Today, the average is almost 5 times that--19 metric tons per person.  So what changed?

PBS Learning has produced a nice little interactive illustration of the ways that energy usage has changed between now and then.  Check out Changing the Balance.

Earth Hour 2012

We've just finished participating in Earth Hour 2012, where people are encouraged to turn off all unnecessary electricity for an hour at 8:30 PM (local time) on the last Saturday of March.  This year we did even better, because we turned off all the lights and information technology (computers, etc.--but we didn't unplug things like our internet router or our refridgerator) and spent the hour reading by oil lamps.

So we got to experience the past (in a minor way).  We discovered it was dim, smokey, and sooty.

So after the hour was up, we turned on one lamp to continue reading (and I'm posting using my computer's battery), but left all our other electricity off.  We like doing this, both as a symbol of willingness to contribute to our planet's energy and environmental problems, and as an experience of our past (and hopefully, not our future....)

We found out about Earth Hour a few years ago from an educator from the NC Zoo, Miss Melinda.  Earth Hour began in Australia, and she was Australian, although I don't know that is why she knew about and/or publicized it.  Anyway, she sent out the information to our Zoo Club, and we've been observing it ever since.  Unfortunately for us, Miss Melinda has gone back to Australia, but we will never forget all the lessons she taught us---including the importance of participating in Earth Hour.

Vanished Science Game: An Update

Another family is playing the Vanished science game with us.  Vanished, as I described in an earlier post, is an online game developed by MIT and the Smithsonian Institute to engage middle schoolers in science investigations.  In the game, we are being contacted by someone from the future, who is trying to figure out what caused an environmental disaster in their time/place that also wiped out all written records.  Participants get various clues and assignments online, but also are requested to go out into the world to collect data about climate, animal and plant species, and other environmental factors, and to upload them onto the site.  There are a number of collaborating museum and science centers that are also sponsoring events to assist with this project.

We are fortunate, because one of the museums that is participating is the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh.  Last week we got a communication from our mysterious online leader telling us to visit the museum on Saturday, April 23, to get more clues about the situation.  So our team went down there, not knowing what to expect.

It took us a bit, but eventually we found our game contact in Miss Liz, who is one of the educators who works at the museum.  She did not tell us anything directly, but pointed us in the direction of a few exhibits that she thought would help answer the cryptic message we had received about visiting the museum.  She was also wonderful about helping us think through what we had noticed from the exhibit, and answering questions about the science of that situation, if not about the game per se, which she said she didn't know any more about than we did.  After we had displayed enough understanding of the exhibit, she awarded us with individual patches from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, as well as what she called an "easter egg" (in the digital sense, even though ours happened to take place during the Easter weekend)--another clue about the mystery, this time in the form of a poem.

I will admit that I am very confused about what is going on with this game.  However, our students are interested and engaged, and they are enjoying it.  We can understand specific directions in the game, including the "missions" that include data collection and reporting, and events such as visiting the Museum on Saturday, and those activities are valuable, regardless of whether or not we ever figure out the overall mystery.   And I really appreciated the activity on Saturday because although we've probably visited that museum close to 100 times since it opened, and have walked by the exhibit involved most of those visits, I never took the time to piece together the story that part of the exhibit told until this Vanished visit on Saturday.  It just goes to show the depth of information in these science museums, and how even those of us who are members and frequent visitors still have lots to learn, no matter how many times we have been there.

So I would recommend this program to other middle schoolers who want to add a little science mystery to their end of the school year activities.  All the past activities are on the website, so you can still catch up if you are interested.  This is an interesting attempt to engage middle schoolers in science in a very non-traditional way.

Earth Hour 2011

It's going to be a short post tonight, because our house is celebrating Earth Hour--the world-wide campaign to shut off lights and non-essential electrical devices for the hour of 8:30-9:30 PM on the last Saturday of March as a reminder of our need for lifestyle changes to prevent climate change.  We were rushing through the clean-up from our latest Presidential Palate dinner (details coming in a future post) so we could turn off all the computers and household lights, gather in one room upstairs in our separate sleeping bags, and read by the one light we left on.  It was quiet time, and we've decided that we would leave the lights and computers off for the entire evening (other than short usages, such as turning on the light when we go into the bathroom and such).

The only problem is that this is usually the time I'm posting on my blog.  So I'm writing this on my laptop using battery power, and am making it short and sweet.

My four favorite things about Earth Hour 2011:
1.  Having a quiet evening of reading with my family
2.  Being part of an international effort to make the world better (albeit in a tiny way)
3.  Playing with the YouTube special Earth Hour light switch, which turns the YouTube background page from white (on) to black (off
4.  Watching this Earth Hour video


It's a small thing.  But that's something that I'm always telling my son--that small things add up.

So I'm getting off the computer now and shutting it down--WITHOUT even having checked my email!  YIKES!  That's a big deal for me.....

Next 4th of July, Drink a Toast to Our Friends, the Mosquitoes

I know that I'm a history buff, so what excites me may not excite everyone else.  But I found another article in the Washington Post this week--and not even in the education section--that I just have to recommend to everyone.

As I wrote in one of my "The Social Network" blogs recently, I think US history, particularly about American History, is too focused on the "Great Man and Woman" approach to history.  In this article, Georgetown University History Professor J.R. McNeill suggests that we didn't win our independence at the Battle of Yorktown due to the brilliance of US General George Washington, or even from the failures of British General Charles Cornwallis, but from the assistance of our allies.  Oh, of course, the French troops, you might be thinking....but that is not what McNeill is referring to.  The Spanish? you might ask.  But no.  Our allies, that invincible force that tipped the scales to the side of the US forces for the victory were, in fact.......mosquitoes.

Of course, it was not mosquitoes, per se, that made the difference.  Rather, it was the malaria infection that the mosquitoes transmitted.  Malaria is one of the most deadly diseases in the world, injecting a parasite into the liver and blood cells that can lead to fever, headaches, hallucinations, coma, and death.  Back then, they had no idea that it was transmitted by mosquitoes, and so took no preventative measures against their attackers (other than for comfort reasons).  They also had no treatment for the disease--or, at least, no treatment that wasn't ineffective at best (eating cobwebs or spiders to tearing out one's hair) and counter-productive at worse (such as draining up to 10% of the blood supply or drinking heavy metals such as mercury).

Of course, it was not as though the mosquitoes that thrived in tidewater Virginia and the Carolinas were partial to the US side and attacked only the British.  Actually, they were pretty equinimical in terms of biting both sides.  The thing is, for most of the American troops, they had been bitten before.  Malaria was a terrible force in the American population, having killed many thousands of people, particularly  children.  But those who had been exposed to the disease and survived (usually multiple times) carried a resistance with them for life.  So while malaria took a toll on the American troops, most American soldiers had already developed some natural protection against the disease.

However, the British and German (or Hessian) troops had not been exposed to this infection.  Therefore, it ran rampant through its ranks, particularly because Cornwallis came to Yorktown after over a year in malaria-ridden South Carolina.  Actually, Cornwallis was headed towards higher, less mosquito-ridden ground when he was ordered to return to tidewater Virginia by his superior officer in New York.  By the time of the Yorktown battle, Cornwallis stated that over half of his men were too sick to serve any effective purpose in fighting the US and French troops (who had arrived only about a month earlier--not long enough for the effects of malaria to have such a dramatic effect on their numbers).

And so it was that a force that was considered to be militarily superior had to surrender to the Americans--all due to those pesky little mosquitoes.

I just love this story.  But I think it illustrates a larger issue about teaching history.  Although I didn't learn history with any environmental factors considered, I think it is critical to include environmental education in our instruction for our children.  This is only one example of the fact that we ignore the environment at our own peril.