Our Earth Day Experiment

I am officially a STEM teacher:) I am one of a few LUCKY teachers who gets to participate in a Sprouting STEMS grant where we get training in teaching Math and Science. AND we get LOTS of free Math and Science materials and free college credit hours!! Can't beat that!!!

Through some of the activities that we did during our STEM classes, I was inspired to do this Earth Day experiment with my class!!!

First, I divided my kiddos into groups of 2 and sent them to their "landfills".

We discovered that our landfill was filled with tires!!!! (Cherios:)
I gave each group a marker and they started crushing the tires.

This part was soooo much fun!!

We successfully reduced the amount of waste in our landfills!!!

The red line shows where the tires used to reach.
Now It's time to recycle!! We added some water and plaster to our shredded tires and mixed it all up!

The last step was to make a road from our tire mixture.

Here we are building our roads!! We set our roads out and let them harden:)
I made a response sheet for the kiddos to fill out during the lesson.  Click on the image below to download it from google docs.

Here is what we learned!! I'm so proud of them:)

("The Cherios are tires."  "We made them littler."  "We made our tires into a road.")

("The Cheerios are tires."  "We made our tires smaller."  "We used our Cheerios to make a road.")

("The Cheerios are tires."  "We smooshed them."  "We recycled tires.")Who says Kinders are too little for these kinds of experiments?! They had a blast and learned so much!!!

HaPpY EaRtH dAy!!!