Fall 2022 Grade 6 KCFS Lesson

Adriaan

Teaching Coordinator Adriaan Louw

  Another semester is behind us, and as always, grade 6 students have completed two project cycles over the past 20 weeks. With classes still dusty from river erosion and smelling slightly of vinegar and baking soda, let’s take a look at what they’ve learned.

  The first project was a deep dive into the muddy mess that is water erosion. Students learned all about the physical erosion process, the factors that contribute to it and slow it down, and how it affects their lives.

  Through their research, this last point becomes clearer, as erosion is not only a serious ecological problem around the world, but especially in Taiwan. With extremely high rainfall and other powerful contributors like earthquakes and typhoons, Taiwan suffers high levels of erosion. 

  Armed with this foreboding knowledge, students are tasked with coming up with designs to protect particularly vulnerable areas such as steep hills and river banks from ongoing erosion. While the planning for this process is rather exciting, the practice always means that the classroom, and many of the students, end up muddy and wet, as reinforcements fail and lessons are learned. As we say in the KCFS rooms, “Water has no mercy!”

  Moving past the need to reinforce rivers to keep them from destroying nature and adding engineering headaches to every engineer that has to work near them, students are guided to shift their thinking from what the water can do to surrounding landscapes, to what is inside the water.

  In the next project, students learn more about how pollution in general, and pollution in water especially can upend the ecological balance of an area, endanger nature, and incidentally vastly increase the speed of erosion.

  Building on this students work with various chemical and green cleaning products to learn about their effects, usefulness, and the dangers of chemicals that are used in day to day life. They then endeavor to design a similarly effective but safer alternative to cleaning with powerful chemical compounds such as ammonia or bleach. Ironically, the very same mud that once made stains everywhere in the class, is effortlessly cleaned away by the safe and environmentally friendly cleaners students make during the second project!

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