Cleaning up spills, preserving the wildlife at The Brandeis school in Lawrence

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Fourth-graders in Donna Weiss’s class at The Brandeis School in Lawrence were posed the question: How can we clean up oil spills from our waters to save wildlife?

Using droppers, children were adding droplets of oil to water to see how it floated on the surface. They tried to absorb the oil back out by using sponges and paper towels, trying to reverse the effect of the eyedropper. 
Students then dropped a cork into the oil-contaminated water.

They were asked how to clean the oil from the cork. The corks, much the same as animals contaminated by oil spilled into the world’s waterways, needed rescuing.