Beach Bucket Sorting

Remember the scavenger hunt at the beach? This week we took the contents of that bucket and looked at them as a group. We took each item out and wrote or drew them on a chart that had the following categories: Evidence of plant life, Evidence of animal life, Evidence of Humans, and Other Natural objects. There was some discussion and disagreement over some of the items. One example was the bone that looked like a chicken thigh bone. Some wanted to put it as evidence of animal life and some wanted to put it as evidence that humans had been there (chicken lunch).

We then discussed how the earth might be more accurately called planet ocean as over 70% of the earth's surface is water. We played a game with a globe beach ball. We threw it to each other and each time someone caught it we looked to see whether the hands were mostly touching land or water. We wrote it down each time. After we were finished about 10 throws (or 20 hands worth of data) we calculated the percentages. They were amazed to see that it came out to nearly 70% of the time touching water!

Sources: 

GEMS: On Sandy Shores 

Grades 2-4 

5 Activities 

212 pages 

 Students explore and deepen their understanding of many aspects of the “sandy shore,” from grains of sand to animals to complex biological and ecological interactions. Activities include: Beach Bucket Scavenger Hunt, Sand on Stage, The Sights that Sand has Seen, Build a Sandy Beach, and Oil on the Beach. Reproducible masters depicting many animals and plants are provided.