The Sea & Me
The Amber Band has been taking some time to make personal connections with the sea. To help with this, we worked with community artist Sierra Reading to learn about how she is helping others make personal connections through art-making. We participated in one of Sierra's projects, Candle Conversations, where each student passed around a candle to share in a discussion while the wax dripped onto a cloth. As students passed the candle, they shared out intentions for the new arc, and let go of some of the things that they wanted to leave behind. Both Amber Band and Indigo Band got to participate in their own Candle Conversation, and we came together to explore indigo dye as a symbol of strength when we then dyed our batiked cloth.
During the By Sea arc we'll be getting more opportunities to collaborate as Ambigo on excursions. We went to the Aquarium of the Bay to learn about our local marine life. Students worked in small teams to record observations on estuaries, ecosystems, and conservation strategies. Each student then chose an animal to research further. Making the connection to our San Francisco Bay got us thinking more about conservation efforts, and how we might do our part to keep the Bay healthy. We decided to adopt drains around the school! This presented a design challenge for us: build a device that will help you safely cleanup the drains in our neighborhood. Each week we'll visit our drains to keep them free of leaves and debris to manage stormwater and minimize flooding in SF.
[embed]https://gfycat.com/ConcernedFelineBlackfly[/embed]Taking our connections to the sea a bit deeper, we've been asking ourselves: What is our relationship to the sea as residents of California, and how might people living in other parts of the world relate to water differently? Just 5% of California was drought-free a year ago, and today it's 91% drought-free! We took some time to simulate the Oroville Dam's use of the emergency spillway by calculating how long it would take to fill a fish tank. The band had to find the volume of the model dam, the water flow rate, and determine their margin of error. We read more about the Oroville Dam, the recent history of the California drought, and American water usage. We decided to track our own water usage, and we analyzed that data.
Next week we'll continue exploring our personal connections to the sea by getting out on the Bay in kayaks, touring Angel Island, creating short film adaptations of the novels we just finished on the immigrant experience, and tracking our personal history on what brought our families to the Bay Area. We'll also start looking at the physics of water, asking questions to find out what we need to know more about water to better understand our relationship to it.