Darryl Dawson: The dunes are blocking the ocean and the grass holds the dunes in place.

Cinquetta Alston: The dunes protect the land from the ocean. The American Beach Grass protects the dunes. At the beach you cannot run or walk on the dunes.

Lataya Jones: People plant the grass on the dunes.

Simon Williford: Trees on the beach cannot grow taller than the dunes.

Jasmine Blunt: The dunes are barriers.

Kerry Hamilton: I learned that the people who work on the beach build gates, so that when the wind blows sand near the gate it will build up dunes. Then when sand gets over the gate, they build another gate to block the sand.

Michael Bibbs: I learned that the dunes protect the sand from the water. The little trees cannot be higher than the dunes because the saltspray burns them.

The sixth grade students at Douglass are not part of the Gold Star Academy, but they studied the ocean too. They traveled to Island Beach two years ago. Here is a summary of the questions they investigated and their findings.

How much of the Earth's surface is covered by water? They used a globe and the laws of probability to find out that between 66 and 75% of the Earth's surface is covered by water. They worked in small groups. Each person in the group took 3 turns spinning the globe with her eyes closed. A tally was kept of the number of times their fingers landed on land or water. Then they calculated the percentage.

Why is the ocean salty? The students set up an ocean/beach model in a sloped paintpan. They poured water over the sand to simulate rain. Water from the pan was placed in an evaporation dish. After the water dried up, they found salt in the dish. By reading The Magic Schoolbus On the Ocean Floor they found out that the ocean is salty because rocks have salt in them, and when the rocks are worn down by water, the salt goes into the water.

How does salt affect ocean water?The students placed a plastic egg weighted down with clay in a containedrof fresh water. They noted that it sank to the bottom of the container. Next, they added salt to the water. The egg began to rise to the top of the water. They found out that objects float more easily in salt water because the salt makes the water thicker (more dense).

How does ocean water move? They found out that ocean water is moved by the wind. The students floated a square of cardboard in a pan of water and blew on the water with a straw. By placing pencil shavings in the pan and blowing on them, they saw how wind causes a circular movement of the the water called currents.

How does ocean water change with depth? The children put a rubber glove on one hand and immersed it in a container of water. They said that the glove got tight on their hand because they could feel the pressure of the water pushing on their hand. We also demonstrated that the pressure gets greater as you go deeper into the ocean. We filled a juice carton with water and poked three pencils into it at different depths. One by one the pencils were removed starting with the top. The hole at the bottom of the container had the longest stream of water because the pressure was greatest at the bottom of the container.

The above findings were taken from the notebook of Candace Brown, room 319.

The sixth-grade students researched different animals that live in the sea. A selection of these reports appears below.