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!

Beach Bucket Scavenger Hunt

As an introduction to our unit on the seashore, and the Chesapeake Bay in particular, we had a scavenger hunt at the beach. The boys were asked to gather 3 things that are evidence of plant life, 2 things that are evidence of animal life and 1 thing that is evidence that humans have been there. They could also pick up 1 non-living material. For the evidence of plants, they found driftwood, twigs, leaves, and seaweed. For evidence of animals, they found shells, feathers and bones. For evidence of humans being there, they found litter, a hair scrunchy and beach glass. For other non-living material they collected rocks and beach glass.