Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Seminole Library




I had a great time visiting the kids at the Library in Seminole today. Two presentations, about the water cycle, were given to, two groups of students. Everyone was so well behaved and seemed to enjoy the story we read together! Here are a few snapshots from today’s presentation.










SERIOUS FACE



SILLY FACE

Friday, June 25, 2010

Greening Your Bath Water – Conservation Tips

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), indoors, 3/4 of all water is used in the bathroom.


One easy and inexpensive way to green your bathroom is to simply save water. Reducing your personal water usage has a tremendous positive impact on the environment and on your wallet. The first step is being mindful of your habits. Do you leave the water running while brushing your teeth? Does your husband shave with a constant stream of hot water running from the faucet? Do you let warm-up water go down the drain while drawing a bubble bath? Changing one of these costly habits will result in immediate savings to you and your planet.

To save even more money by conserving water, consider installing an aerator on your faucet. Without an aerator, water usually flows out of a faucet as one big stream. An aerator spreads this stream into many little droplets. This helps save water and reduces splashing.


Showering represents approximately 17 percent of residential indoor water use in the United States—more than 1.2 trillion gallons of water consumed each year. Inexpensive and simple to install, low-flow shower heads can reduce your home water consumption as much as 50%, and reduce your energy cost of heating the water also by as much as 50%

To cut down on water waste, put an inch or two of sand or pebbles inside each of two plastic bottles to weigh them down. Fill the bottles with water, screw the lids on, and put them in your toilet tank, safely away from the operating mechanisms.

You can also purchase an inexpensive “tank bank”. This may save ten or more gallons of water per day.
TIP: Be sure at least 3 gallons of water remain in the tank so it will flush properly.

If you are in the market for a new toilet, consider a “low flush” model which use 1 to 2 gallons per flush instead of the usual 3 to 5 gallons.

Replacing an 18 liter per flush toilet with an ultra-low volume (ULV) 6 liter flush model represents a 70% savings in water flushed and will cut indoor water use by about 30%.

No matter what model toilet you use, never flush garbage of any kind. Every time you flush a cigarette butt, facial tissue or other small bit of trash, five to seven gallons of water is wasted.

source: greenlivingguide.org

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Seagraves Library



Yesterday, I spent the morning talking to a group of students at the Seagraves Community Center. The Seagraves Library hosts a summer reading program, for youth in their community, every summer. I was asked to be a guest speaker this year, and was excited to get a chance to talk to their students.
I started the program by talking about the water cycle and the diffract components that help make it possible. The kids seemed shocked to learn that the water they use or drink, could be from when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.
We then read the book, A Drop Around the World by Barbara Shaw McKinney. We learned how a single water droplet can make its’ way around the world, by using the water cycle. The single drop traveled to jungles, desserts, glaciers and even ended up inside a cows stomach.


We ended the morning by playing the Project Wet activity “The Incredible Journey”. In this game, the students would become water droplets and go on an incredible journey, like the water drop in our book. I had eight stations set up, and the students would roll a dice to see which location they would go to next. Sometimes they would be a drop in a lake and other times they would be in a cloud. Each station also had a bucket of beads, in different colors, to represent that location. The students had a bracelet, and each time their journey took them to another location, they would collect that color bead to place on their bracelet. At the end of the game the students and I discussed where everyone had went on their incredible journey by looking at the different color bead on their bracelet




The students in Seagraves were wonderful to work with and I look forward to talking to them next summer!


Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Funny Pictures Spring 2010

There are a lot of things that I love about my job, but there has always been one thing that stands out among everything else. I absolutely love looking at ALL of the students pictures from our art contest.
There are always those few pictures that stand out because of the incredible artwork, but those are not the ones that I anticipate to see. Sometimes I will get a few pictures in my piles that make me fall out of my chair laughing. It is so funny to see what the students come up with, from what I have said to them about water conservation. Sometimes it is the picture that makes me laugh, other times it is the spelling or the message they are trying to portray. But enough with me blabbing….have a good laugh


I thought this one was cute because the dog bowl is HUGE! it would take a 800 lb dog

Seems that someone has been watching CNN! but not sure what "dont smoke clouds" means

" The more you drip the more the tip"?
"Collect rain water and give it to your pets."
I didn't know what kind of pet this was



this one is just cute! I love the zebra



"save water by washing your clothes when it is raining." I did not teach them this!



My Aggie boss was the only one that could read this....
What your lawn at "nite" or night


This picture is going to hang in my office! I love it!
I guess i am a sucker for a good rhyme










Wednesday, June 2, 2010

The Real Cost of Water

To view the article, click on the image and you will be directed to a site where you can zoom in to read the article in full.