Ocean plastics - with guest Donovan Hohn

Ocean plastics are a major issue for the planet, and we have been exploring this with Year 8.
We started with the Friendly Floatees: the bath toys which fell off a ship in the North Pacific in 1992.
These floated around the oceans in the North Pacific gyre and helped oceanographers identify the speed of the current and circulation in that area. Ducks have become trapped in the current, but others have washed ashore. Only a few of the 29 000 bath toys that originally fell into the sea have been found.
With some Year 8 groups, we researched what happened next...

This involved us doing some tweeting on the @KingsElyGeog account, and we even managed to get some messages from Donovan Hohn, author of the book 'Moby Duck' which is all about the duck spill.
This one here for example:

@KingsElyGeog Ducks bear brand name (First Years) but mainly the distinctive design. This is a circa 1990 package. pic.twitter.com/3EITRXxCyq

— Donovan Hohn (@donovanhohn) May 5, 2015

Watch this animation here.

The Global Ocean project has produced a free downloadable teaching pack, called 'Plastic not Fantastic' which can be downloaded as a PDF by clicking the link.

We will explore this further with other groups to finish off our unit on the Geography of our Stuff...