For my article review, I chose "What can trees tell us about the air we breathe in our home" by Jordan Wilson, V. Samaranayake, Matt Limmer and Joel Burken. I thought this article was a good one to review because it involves the ideas that the air in houses can be affected by bad stuff, called contaminants. Sometimes harmful chemicals enter the air in buildings from nearby contaminated soil and groundwater through cracks or gaps in the foundation. This is a process known as vapor intrusion. This poses some risk to our health because we spend so much of our time indoors. Currently, it’s difficult and expensive to figure out if vapor intrusion is happening. That’s why we wanted to see if trees can serve as indicators for vapor intrusion. When we talk about air pollution, we usually imagine big factories that produce a lot of chemicals or traffic jams in big cities. These are serious issues that can cause many health problems, but they usually affect the air outside. Most of us spend much more of our lives indoors, at home, school, or work. These are places where we breathe “indoor air,” or air inside buildings. Sometimes the indoor air can be contaminated: some building materials emit harmful vapors. This is good to teach the students that air pollution is not only outside but inside commonplace we are every day. 
In the article, an experiment was completed:
The samples consisted of 109 tree-core samples 10 replicate samples (samples of the same trees to see how well the values can be repeated) 2 control samples (samples that show if there is contamination getting into the tree-core samples from other sources). Between November 2014 and September 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tested this region. They collected and analyzed groundwater, soil, and soil-gas samples as well as indoor air and air below the foundations of buildings. Other good news is that the tree samples we collected are good indicators of chemicals in indoor air as well. We can all do a lot of things to improve the quality of our indoor air: open windows regularly, completely close the caps on all chemicals at home, and not buy more chemicals, than we need.
It is important to teach students about experiments being conducted and problems that are occurring in the environment. They need to be aware of this issues. This article can be used in the higher grades, 5-6. You can use this article to check the students understanding by using the question provided with the article. This can be a science lesson or an ELA lesson. If used for an ELA lesson, you want to remind the students to use complete sentences and to highlight important information in the article that can answer the questions. This can also be read to the students and talk about the article with them to answer any questions they may have about it .The article also provides a glossary of the words that students may not understand. As the teacher, you can add more words that you know your students may not understand.
Overall, this article was very informative a taught me about environmental issues that I was not ever aware of. Everyone is always learning!
Hello Maria,
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of vapor intrusion before. Your reflection on this article was fascinating. You would think the place to escape air toxins would be indoors. I also that you reflected on how to use this article in a classroom and more specifically what grades you would use it with.
Nicole
Hi Maria,
ReplyDeleteThis was a good article to review and use in a classroom. Not enough of us know about indoor air contaminants. We had to install a radon mitigation system in our basement because the level in the air was well above the recommended 4.0 pCi/L. Radon is a gas found in the soil. I even had our water tested because radon gas can dissolve and enter underground water sources (wells). It is the 2nd leading cause of cancer from indoor air. Even though we have this system in place and test the air frequently, it still scares me to let my son play his video games down there so we keep it to a minimum. During the warmer months we also keep a door open to the outdoors to have air circulate.
This was a really interesting read. Too often we think of environmental problems as being something outside of our homes and that inside is a kind of safe space from all that. Turns out that isn't the case and inside our homes lurk other issues that need to be concerned with.
ReplyDeleteI too had never heard of vapor intrusion as a concept, but it does make sense. Helps to show important it is to fix our problems, since there is no refuge from them.
It was a nice touch to look at ways this article could be used to contribute to a lesson, with ideas of how to apply it, not only in a science setting, but also an ELA setting. That kind of flexibility only adds to the usefulness of the information.