Class Update

Monday and Tuesday, November 23 & 24. We spent last Thursday and Friday as well as this Monday and Tuesday working on our Radio Projects. They finished up their research and started recording their presentations using Garageband to create podcasts. We will get a chance to hear all of them next week after the Thanksgiving Break.

Class Update

Monday and Tuesday, November 17 & 18.
We have been working in our small groups researching the topics for our Radio Presentations. We are looking for information about how these products are grown in Latin America and exported to the United States. We are looking into the hidden environmental and social costs of these products and how this might factor into our decisions when we buy these products. The projects are due on Tuesday, November 24th.

Thursday, November 12. Today we split into groups to start our project on Imports from Central and South America to the United States. Each group will research either Coffee, Bananas, Cut Flowers, or Chocolate and look into the environmental and social costs of these materials. Each group will produce an investigative journalism radio piece in the form of a podcast to share the results of their research. These projects will be due on November 24th.

Wednesday, November 11. We went over the reading from "Confessions of an Eco Sinner" about cotton production and the manufacturing of a t shirt and the many hidden costs especially in terms of water and pesticide use. No homework.

Tuesday, November 10. We listened to a radio report from "Market Place" on National Public Radio, called "A Well Traveled Breakfast" that examines the distances traveled in the transportation of the food we eat. Check out the radio piece here: A Well Traveled Breakfast. We also read a story about Soccer Ball manufacturing in Pakistan that introduced the concept of Fair Trade and the many different issues that are involved in determining the price of something.

Monday, November 9. We finished our final posters, did the self evaluations and evaluated two others. We watched part of a film called "T Shirt Travels" about the second hand clothing industry in Zambia. Here is a short excerpt from the film on Utube: Tshirt Travels.

Homework is an excerpt from the book, "Confessions of an Eco Sinner." by Fred Pearce. It is the chapter about how cotton is grown. Reading due on Wednesday, Nov. 11th.

Class Update

Friday, November 6th. We worked more on our Story of a Shirt Posters. Quite a few people finished them and hung them in the hallways. Those people started the self evaluations and on Monday we should have all of them up and we will do the peer evaluations as well. In addition to researching origins of a shirt, some people chose to research pencils or sneakers.

Class Update

Thursday, November 5th. Today we continued working on the "Story of A Shirt" project. We are hoping to have it all finished by the end of class on Friday, November 6th (Tomorrow). We discussed how the projects will be evaluated by me, by themselves, and then each of them would evaluate two others. The evaluations will point out two things that they thought were well done and one thing that could possibly be improved.
Tuesday and Wednesday were block schedules, meaning that we only met once for 1 hour 15 minutes. We used this time to research the resources used and pollution created at each stage of the manufacturing of our shirts.

Class Update

Monday, November 2nd.
Today we started work on a project called, "Story of a Shirt." We used an article about how a shirt is manufactured and the resources involved in the manufacturing and transportation process. We will research the resources used and the pollution created. This will be put into a storyboard poster that will be finished on Friday, November 6th.

Class Update

Thursday, Oct 29th we had our Ecology Unit test.
Friday, Oct 30th, we read a story about the resources involved in making a t shirt and started filling in a chart that maps the sources of the materials and the energy involved in the manufacturing process. Class was short due to our Halloween schedule. This is an introduction to a mini unit on resources, pollution, and human impacts on the environment.