Young children have probably heard about oil spills, but they may not understand how they affect our environment. This oil spill activity exposed your young activists to  the importance of protecting our natural resources from harmful events like oil spills. Using dish soap, feathers and oil, we learned about how oil affects the birds most vulnerable to oil spills. In addition to promoting an awareness of environmental issues, this activity also served as an opportunity to experiment with complicated measurement concepts such as width, height, volume and density.