Can You Create a Simple, Healthy, and Earth-Safe Cleaner?

Can You Create a Simple, Healthy, and Earth-Safe Cleaner?
An Earth Day Lesson Plan for Grades 5-7

Sponsored by Seventh Generation: www.seventhgeneration.com

A printer-friendly version of this lesson is available in PDF format here. Please feel free to browse the text of the lesson below and customize it to fit the needs of your students.

Happy Earth Day from Seventh Generation!
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Teacher Pages
Can You Create a Simple, Healthy, and Earth-Safe Cleaner?
Celebrating Earth Day
Each year on April 22nd, we celebrate the birth of the modern environmental movement. Earth Day has become the voice through which millions of people worldwide fight for a clean environment.
Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day founder and Senator from Wisconsin from 1963-1981, proposed the first large-scale environmental protest in 1970 in order to shake the political establishment and force environmental issues onto the national agenda.

Since that first Earth Day celebration the world has come to recognize that we all have to do our part to keep our Earth clean and safe. We hope you enjoy sharing these ideas with your students and teaching the future generation about the importance of keeping our world healthy.

Introduction
Let your students be the chief product designers as they formulate and test simple, Earth-safe, healthy and effective surface cleaners from baking soda and vinegar. Through these lessons and investigations, students will make connections between the cleaning products used in their homes and schools, indoor air quality and water pollution.
These lessons will support your studies of the water cycle and water pollution, as well as human effects on the environment or ecosystems. Through this series of investigations, students will develop an understanding of the impact products can have on their health and the entire ecosystem
National Science Standards
This lesson and its extensions address the following national science standards:

Science as Inquiry (Content Standard A)
Science in Personal and Social Perspectives (Content Standard F)

Grade Levels: 5-7
Lesson Duration: Flexible, one day to one week depending upon your scope and commitment.

Lesson Goal: Students will investigate the effectiveness of baking soda and vinegar as cleaning products. Through extensions to this lesson, students will develop their understanding that waste does not disappear and that the products that we use in our homes affect the air quality which in turn affects our health.
Materials
Minimum of four, empty bottles of surface cleaning products
Note: Be sure to have a good selection of natural, non-toxic cleaners (e.g., Seventh Generation, Ecover) as well as conventional cleaners (e.g., Formula 409, Windex). Begin asking students to save these empty bottles as early as possible so that you will have enough for the exercise. Be sure to rinse the bottles thoroughly.
Baking soda
White vinegar
Tap water
Dirty classroom surfaces (desk tops, chairs, windows, whiteboard marker trays, etc)
Beakers

Funnels
Graduated cylinders
Spray or squirt bottles
Sponges, rags, paper towels
Lesson Description and Outline
Part 1: Product Analysis (One class period)
Engage students in this investigation by reading the “Dear Students” letter. This introduces them to the investigation. Pause at each of the questions in the letter and ask students to record their initial response. Following the letter, students may work in small groups to read labels and compare various cleaning products, including baking soda and vinegar. Be sure to use empty cleaning product bottles. After the students have analyzed their product, they may share their results with the class. One option is to create a chart that displays all of their research. After they have shared and learned about all of the products, facilitate a discussion that compares the commercial products to baking soda and vinegar. It is important to emphasize the effect of different products on the indoor air quality and on the environment.
Questions to promote discussion and provoke thoughts:

What do these products have in common?
Which of these products is safe enough for humans to consume? What connection might there be between a cleaning product being edible and it being safe?
Would you pour any of these into your pond or aquarium? Why or why not?
Which of these claim to be safe for kids to use, or don’t caution to “keep away from children”? What do you think makes those products different than the others?

Student Forms:
Dear Students letter: The Cost of Clean
Product Research: What’s in the Cleaner

Part 2: Design and Test Products (Two class periods)
Students are the chief scientists as they design their own cleaning products and test them on the surfaces in your classroom. Encourage students to record the details of each experiment in their investigation notes. Students are easily engaged in concocting and testing their cleaning products. It may be useful to discuss what works well and what problems they noticed with their products at the end of the first class session.
Student Forms:
Investigation Notes: Design an Earth-Safe Cleaner

Part 3: Wrap-up Discussion
Facilitate a discussion to support students as they make connections between their simple cleaners and indoor air and water quality.
Student Forms:
Post-Investigation Discussion Pages
Extensions
This is a list of ideas that can extend your students’ inquiry into creating safe and healthy cleaning products.

Create an advertisement using the results of your experiment to demonstrate the effectiveness of these simple products. Your advertisements must include the ingredients and claims about the product’s impacts on air quality and the environment.
Research why baking soda and vinegar are considered “safe and healthy” cleaning products.
Design an experiment that tests whether your cleaning product is less harmful to living organisms than commercial brands. For example, students can sprout bean plants and water them with dilute solutions of their cleaner and commercial cleaners.
Investigate the indoor air quality at your school. Conduct a survey to identify the sources of indoor air pollution. Work with your school community to change at least one air quality offender.
Start a campaign to improve indoor air quality at your school. Start plants from cuttings and grow them in classrooms. Encourage students to track the time they spend indoors and attempt to decrease it. Create bulletin boards and informational posters to inform your school community about the problem of indoor air pollution and how to address it.
Research where the water comes from and where it goes in your school and town. Create signs adjacent to water supplies throughout the school to indicate the source and destination and that all that goes down the drain does not simply “go away”.
Visit a water treatment plant and find out what can and cannot be removed from untreated water.
Research and read about the effects of not having access to clean water. What are the effects of dumping chemicals into our water that are not removed through filtration? What are the effects on humans and the entire ecosystem?
Have teams give squeeze bottles of their cleaners to another class (to use in the classroom) or staff (to use at home) and ask them to report on effectiveness, etc.
Develop a price comparison of the vinegar/baking soda cleaners and store-bought cleaners.
Design labels, with all usage instructions and warnings for the cleaners.
Investigate the chemical compositions and reactions of baking soda (NaHC03) and the vinegar solution (H20 + C2H402), their end products etc.
Investigate the reasons why non-cleaning ingredients are used (e.g., VOCs to facilitate evaporation) and the “cost” of these conveniences.
Investigate other types of natural/home products that can be substituted for commercial/chemical products (e.g., vinegar and salt can be used as a weed killer)

Resources

Project Wet
A great resource for water related activities and investigations. The activities are not online, but are described in the Project Wet book.
http://www.projectwet.org/

A detailed list of water related activities and investigations published by Project Wet.
http://www.nj.gov/dep/seeds/njcee/WaytoGo.pdf

Magic School Bus
Cole, J. 1986. The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks. Scholastic Corporation
Read the story of students and their teacher journeying through the local water systems as water droplets.

Properties of Matter Investigation
A science investigation into the physical and chemical properties of various substances, including baking soda and vinegar.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/activities/3402_julian.html

Making Your Own Household Cleaners
Hollender, J., Davis, G., Doyle, R. 2005, Naturally Clean, The Seventh Generation Guide to Safe and Healthy, Non-Toxic Cleaning. New Society Publishers
A short excerpt about making your own cleaners from common, household ingredients.
http://www.seventhgeneration.com/files/Naturally_Clean_excerpt.pdf

Water Education Collaborative
An interactive watershed awareness website complete with games, activism opportunities and an H20 University. The Watershed, Home of the H20 Hero.
http://www.h2ohero.org/

This Earth Day lesson is sponsored by Seventh Generation and was designed by Katy Chabot,
MS Environmental Studies. Katy teaches 7th and 8th grade science at Peoples Academy in Morrisville, Vermont. If you’d like to send feedback about this lesson please email recycle@seventhgeneration.com or visit us online at www.seventhgeneration.com.

Student Pages

The Cost of Clean
Dear Students,
Have you noticed the greasy fingerprints, pencil marks, drink spills and snack food smears that seem to cover the surfaces in our classroom? Take a closer look at the tables, chairs, counters, lockers and windows around you. All of the surfaces that we touch are coated with grease and grime from our bodies and the products we use in the classroom. Of course, we clean the surfaces in our classroom regularly. And after we clean, the classroom feels healthier, fresher and safer—but is it?
Have you ever wondered about the health effects of spraying all those cleaners?
What happens when you breathe air that contains cleaning chemicals?
Also, what happens when the sponges are squeezed out and the cleaning solution runs down the drain?
Where do the products go once they leave the classroom?
What effects might they have on our watershed and our ecosystem?

Many conventional cleaning products are harmful to humans, the environment and the watershed because of the chemicals that they contain. However, there are alternatives available from companies that make natural, non-toxic cleaners that are safe for people, pets and the environment we all share. Unlike most cleaning products, these natural cleaners do not need to be locked in a child-proof cabinet under the kitchen sink.

Did you know that you can even make your own cleaners from safe, simple ingredients found in your home? In fact, most of you have even eaten or cooked with these materials!
Your challenge in the next few days is to determine the effectiveness of these simple products—baking soda, vinegar and water—as cleaning agents.
You will be the head product designers and testers as you concoct combinations of these three ingredients to test on various dirty, grimy surfaces in your classroom. Your goal is to determine the best combination to create the cleanest result, with the least work.
In the end, you’ll share the results of your investigations with your classmates, friends and families as you create an advertisement for your environmentally safe cleaning product. Even better, you might be able to effect change in at least one person’s habits with your product.

What’s in the Cleaner? Product Research
Product Research—Be sure to take careful notes as all of your research will contribute to creating the most Earth-safe product in the end.
Work with a small group of students to investigate a common cleaning product. Complete the chart as you read the labels on the product. Later, you’ll compare the results to those for baking soda and vinegar.

Product Name

Product Purpose

Ingredients

Warnings and Cautions

Be prepared to contribute your ideas to a master chart that shows the results of all your classmates’ product analysis.
After looking at the evidence, imagine that the different products were sprayed in the air around you, what would you notice? What effect might the products have if you breathed them in?
Design an Earth-Safe Cleaner: Investigation Notes
Now that you have researched some of the common cleaning products out there, your challenge is to design a cleaning product that is effective and safe for the Earth and humans. This means that your product does not pollute the air in your classroom with harmful fumes and does not have a negative effect on the ecosystem when it leaves the classroom through the sewer system.
The classroom is your laboratory. Design a cleaning product and test it on various surfaces in the classroom. Suggestions include: chairs (especially the undersides), table surfaces, the whiteboard marker tray, windows, counters and stray marks on the walls. Most surfaces are great test subjects, but be sure to check in with your teacher first.
Materials:
Baking soda (50 mL)
Vinegar (50 mL)
Water
Beakers
Graduated cylinders
Irrigation bottles or spray bottles
Sponges
Hints:

Design at least three cleaners to find the best one.

Make at least one cleaner that contains only baking soda and water and one that contains only vinegar and water. You can vary the ratio of baking soda to water or vinegar to water to change the product.
Record the amount of each ingredient in each cleaner—very important!

Test each product you make and rate its effectiveness. Questions to ask include: Did the product remove the dirt? Did the product make the surface appear clean, or did it leave a white residue? If it left a white residue, what will you need to do to remove it?

Product 1

Ingredients
Amount of Each Ingredient

Where did you test the product?
What were your results?
What are your conclusions about the product’s effectiveness?
What will you do to change the product to make it more effective?

Product 2

Ingredients
Amount of Each Ingredient

Product 3

Ingredients
Amount of Each Ingredient

Product 4

Ingredients
Amount of Each Ingredient

Post-Investigation Discussion Questions
Describe the effectiveness of the cleaning products you created. Give examples of the types of dirt and grime they cleaned effectively.

What were the effects on air quality? How did the product smell? In what ways might the smell affect your health?

What will happen when your product goes down the drain? Compare this to the effect that will result from the commercial products going down the drain.

Imagine that a large quantity of your product and another commercial product were each dumped directly into a small pond. Describe how you think each of the products would affect the pond ecosystem.