Read the Nat Geo article about the global population boom posted on our website and answer these questions:
1) Which topic (water, food, energy, development) are you most interested in working on and why?
2) What information from this article can you use in your topic and how would you present this information to the 4th graders (use a game, create a slideshow, etc.) ?
3) What additional information do you need that this article does not supply and where will you look for it?
Due Wednesday, March 23rd at 1 pm.
The topic I am most interested in working with is development. Clementine and I discussed further applying the idea of recycling to use with our group. The theme of recycling would be a great topic for the children because they can apply the idea of reusing everyday items in their daily lives. By reading the article I found that the consumption map is extremely useful for our subject. The map shows the extremity of the amount spent on consumption in the U.S.A.
ReplyDeleteBy using this visual information we can apply to the children direct effects of creating waste. There are a few ways to show the kids the problems with human waste and lack of recycling today. We could create a card game for the kids in order to share the information in a fun and educational way. An example would be the game Memory. We could have several pairs of cards that have the name of it's matching pair at the bottom. For example, one card could have a jelly jar full and say "jelly jar" the other card could have a jelly jar empty with pens and pencils in it and say "jelly jar recycled" at the bottom.
There are many ways to get the information about recycling across to the kids, however we would need to do a little more research. There are hundreds of DIY recycling websites and many books on how to reuse daily items at home that would be helpful to our research.
I am mostly interested in working on the topic of water. When I say water, I am not really referring to drinking water or the consumption of water, but I find it particularly interesting how much the flow of water and our ocean currents can affect our lives. Because of global warming, the icecaps in the North Pole and in Greenland are melting. This is causing a huge amount of freshwater to be dumped into our oceans. The dilution of salinity in the ocean is causing the currents to change – currents are powered by the sinking of dense salty water, but if we do not have water salty enough to sink, nothing will motor these currents. Currents account for 40% of our stable warm climates, the other 6o% powered by the sun. But, 40% is a lot and if the currents continue this way, we will be expecting a mini-ice age. Water is an extremely important part of life, and keeping it the way it is supposed to be is something we must educate children about.
ReplyDeleteIn the article, it mentions, “the number of people does matter, of course. But how people consume resources matters a lot more”. We have all sorts of means for alternative energy, but we still chose to burn fossil fuels. This burning of coal is creating a thicker greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, trapping heat more so than allowing it to bounce back into space. Frozen water also allows for sunlight to be reflected into the atmosphere, stabilizing temperatures all around the globe. If the ice melts, there will only be one place for the heat to go, and that is directly in the ocean.
These 4th graders are really a lot smarter than I thought they would be. I think if we were to sit down and explain the currents and how the sun heats the world, they would be able to understand quite thoroughly. I will draw diagrams and use easy comparisons so they can make connections between what we are talking about and daily things. For example, comparing the north pole to a giant air conditioner can be a simple way for the children to understand how important this frozen water really is.
The article provides thorough information regarding overpopulation and the importance of distribution of clean, fresh water for people to drink, however it does not talk about water as a means for climate control. I am currently enrolled in a class called Human Impacts on Marine Biology; therefore I have sufficient knowledge of what is going on with our climate in relation to the ocean. I also have different articles that describe the whole process in detail that I can use as a source for reliable information.
1) I am most interested in working on the topic of food because I have done previous research on the topic and find it the most interesting and its numbers the most staggering. The areas that continue to grow substantially are also the ones that have the least resources (food especially) to sustain their population.
ReplyDelete2) Some of the information that I gathered from this article included:
“Lester Brown, founder of Worldwatch Institute and now head of the Earth Policy Institute in Washigton, believes food shortages could cause a collapse of global civilization. Human beings are living off natural capital, Brown argues, eroding soil and depleting groundwater faster than they can be replenished. All of that will soon be cramping food production.”
“The World Bank has predicted that by 2030 more than a billion people in the developing world will belong to the ‘global middle class,’ up from just 400 million in 2005. That’s a good thing. But it will be a hard thing for the planet if those people are eating meat and driving gasoline-powered cars at the same rate as Americans now do. It’s too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born; it’s not too late to change how they and the rest of us will produce and consume food and energy. “Eating less meat seems more reasonable than saying, ‘have fewer children!’ Le Bras says.
I would present it in a slideshow.
3) Other information that I gathered during previous research included:
“950 million people in the world are starving”
“20,000 people die each day of starvation”
1)I am most interested in working with the topic of development. As addressed in the article, I find it interesting that the well-planned use of infrastructures can make the difference between catastrophic urban sprawl or being able to house the world’s population in areas that are already developed now, without the need to further expand into vulnerable ecosystems.
ReplyDelete2)The article provided information on the inefficient nature of increasing populations where sound infrastructures do not exist, with a prominent example being the city of Delhi. Also, it was incredible to think that the entire population would fit into the area of Texas, if it were as densely populated as New York City. This may at first seem like a ridiculous thought-to expect all inhabited areas to be as densely populated as N.Y; but with the development of clean energy and successful public transport, this may be far from a hellish future. Because, after all, how many empty/half-developed neighborhoods of mini-mansion exist in our immediate area? To inform the students, information would be presented in a slideshow, and a hands-on activity could include a comparison of building a mini-cityscape with big, individual objects, or ones that fit together like a puzzle, wasting less space, and creating a more aesthetically pleasing product. These could both be built on a green surface, and the green areas left could also be compared.
3) I would need to find visual examples of modern cities with the most successful infrastructures. These could possibly serve as references for the print ( maybe have students create what they imagine a perfect infrastructure to be in the future).