Cleaning up oil spills

As part of our Coastal Capers unit, we looked at how oil spills can be cleaned up.  We made classroom model of a coastline with salt water, feathers and shells. Then we poured in vegetable oil to model an oil spill at sea, such as the Rena disaster.  We tried cleaning the oil using detergent and various cleaning materials such as toothbrushes, wool fleece, steel wool, tinfoil, cotton buds and cotton.  It was slow,  painstaking work but we found that wool fleece with detergent was the most successful combination.