Water pollution - the experiment

I wanted to create a sensory bin for E. connected to Earth Day. What makes this difficult is she doesn't like to dirty her hands, so we tried the water pollution idea I saw at Every Star Is Different, as she could use some tools to work with rubbish.

What you need:
- clean water in a tub of any kind
- rubbish (banana skin, orange skin, crust of bread, tea bag, plastic packaging of any kind etc.)
- oil (optional - it makes cleaning up difficult)
- tongs
- strainer
- a bowl to put the rubbish in

What to do:

We talked about the clean water and name every piece of rubbish. We also mentioned natural waters (seas, oceans, rivers and lakes) and that animals live in there.

Then I asked E. to throw all the rubbish in the water. She was quite reluctant at first.

- Why Mommy? It will be dirty.

That was the point. I told her about the scarce drinking water on Earth and also about poor animals which try to survive in the dirty waters.

She also poured the oil in, which was a brave move from my part as everything got oily. The cleaning up lasted forever.

Then she fished out the rubbish from the dirty water.

She tried to clean the oil and the small tea leaves too with a strainer but she didn't managed, of course.

We drew the conclusion: We need to take care of water and keep it clean because we can't drink it  or animals can't live in it if it's dirty. And water is essential for life.