Mrs. McGilvray's Class

Our recycle PBL has allowed us to do so many hands on experiments these last few weeks. We continued our natural resource discussion on Thursday and began talking about how plants are a very important part of our environment. We had 7 pounds of recyclable material in just 1 day (hooray!!), so we decided to put some of those items to good use… other than sending them to the recycling plant, of course. We combined our learning of plants and our love for reusing items and created container gardens. Students planted flowers and vegetables in recycled containers. Check our their planting experience!

Final Product

Our PBL (Project Based Learning) study has allowed us to go beyond just recycling! I love it how just one topic can lead to so many different avenues.  This week we spent some time talking about how we can reduce, reuse, and care for our natural resources. We dove further into that and began talking about water pollution. Being the eager scientists we are, we just HAD to filter our own “polluted” water and try to make them clean again. Check out the team work that went into making this dream work!

Before: Planning Stages

During: Testing their plan & working to solve the problem. 

After: Final Results

We’ve been studying the 3 R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle). Today we discussed decomposition of items in landfills. We were shocked to discover items such as plastic water bottles can take 450 years to decompose. Today’s driving question was: Which dumped items are least harmful to our environment? We submerged a styrofoam egg carton and a paper egg carton in water to see which one would break down more quickly. This promoted so many good conversations about recycling and reusing items. Today’s results were interesting, but we cannot wait to see what happens to the cartons as they are left in water over the weekend!

Egg Cartons Before:

Egg Cartons During:

Egg Cartons After 1 Hour:

Great job to Avery, Brooklyn, and Trevor for being CHAMPS. They are wonderful role models for our school!

Bring clean, recyclable items to help us with our recycle PBL (Project Based Learning).

Check out summer info from Boys & Girls Club.

Before spring break we celebrated Texas Independence Day with a research project. Students were able to find interesting facts about our great state, locate major cities, and determine what could be found in each region of Texas. We also learned that there are many different symbols that represent Texas. Check out the progress and stay tune for a video of final presentations via See Saw.