On our Community Walk, Ms Elder had us complete a Layered Listening activity. First, we were silent for 30 seconds. We wrote down (or drew pictures of) all of the things we heard. Then, we did that for 1 minute, and finally, for 5 minutes. One reason we did this was to see/hear more animals. The longer we're quiet, the more comfortable the animals are and then they start moving around. We also did this to develop our listening observation skills. The longer we listened, the more sounds we were able to hear. When we sat for 5 minutes, we could hear quiet noises from far away because we were so still.
This also relates to human impact. We heard a lot of traffic. This is called noise pollution. Other types of pollution are: light, air, water, and waste.
Yesterday, we took action on waste pollution. We had gloves, garbage bags, and grabbers to pick up trash as we walked.
We also observed the changes in the environment over time (it's been a month since we did our last Community Walk).
Here are some reflections from the day:
"We should take way better care of our Earth. We found SO much garbage that one bag was heavy and we had four of those and that was just from a one hour walk." ~ Sy
"I enjoyed doing the Layered Listening because I could hear sounds from super far away." ~ Alice
"I noticed how the Layered Listening, when we started to be really quiet, there were so many more sounds, especially on the 5 minute one." ~ Artur
"I really liked the Layered Listening because I could hear lots of new sounds that I had never heard before." ~ Abbey
"I liked doing the Layered Listening because when you actually sat still and listened, you could hear sounds from far away." ~ Clover
"I liked the walk because when we did the Layered Listening, the quieter we were, the more sounds we heard, so we could fill up more of our paper." ~ Olivia
"I liked the walk because we could see the changes from last month to this month." ~ Charlie
"I didn't realize how much garbage there could be in just a small area." ~ Hudson
