8th Grade Focuses on Oil Spills

In 8th Grade Language Arts, students began the year by exploring two works of non-fiction focused on the topic of oil spills, and their effects on both the environment and human beings. They concluded their first week by creating a miniature ecosytem complete with a rock, dirt, vegetation, and water, and then simulating the effects of an oil spill in their ecosytem.

As they engineered their own booms from a variety of materials and used chemical dispersants to break up the oil slick, the challenges of containing and cleaning oil from the environment became apparent. By studying the Exxon-Valdez and BP spills, they realized that in order to properly manage a commodity as toxic and fraught with danger as oil, companies need to spend as much time thinking about safety and containment as they do on the extraction of the oil from wells