Dangerous Decibels

Today we (Room 41) went to Dangerous Decibels in the Whare Kai, where we learnt about our ears
and what can hurt them. Toni was our teacher for the session.
Dangerous Decibels is a program which teaches kids about hearing loss and how to avoid it.
We learnt that decibels are a way of measuring sound, just like kilograms are a way of measuring other things.
The amount of Decibels that is safe to be around is 85, where at 90 you can be around the noise for 2 hours. As the amount of decibels go higher, the amount of time you can be around the noise goes shorter.

Toni showed us a chart with three colours. At the bottom was green, then orange, then red. Green was the sounds you could listen to forever, and some of the things on it were; Washing Machine, Food Mixer, Piano Practice, and Rain. The orange was things that are dangerous but can be okay for a period of time. Car Traffic, 8 hours, Lawn mower, 2 hours, Motorcycle, 15 minutes, etc. The red held things that you can't listen too, and things that might instantly kill our ears. Fireworks, A Bass Drum, and a Heavy Metal Concert.

Then we did a few small activities.

Toni asked us to put our fingers in our ears to block out as much sound as possible. We then had to talk to the person beside us to see how it would be like, all day, everyday, to have severe hearing loss.

We then took a tuning fork each and banged it once on the ground. We held it away from our ears a few centimetres and listened to the sound it made. After that we took a ping pong ball on a string and banged the fork on the ground once. We then held that spot to the ping pong ball. The ping pong ball bounced back and forth. We repeated this, but with more bangs on the ground, which made the bounces more violent.

5 volunteers took a hand full  of pipe cleaners. These represented the tiny hairs in your ears that you can damage. They gently brushed their hand over the pipe cleaners, pretending their hand was normal talking. The pipe cleaners popped back. Then they violently hit the pipe cleaners. This was meant to be a heavy metal concert. The pipe cleaners got damaged. The volunteers tried to fix them but it was impossible.

The final activity was where 3 volunteers got given a decibel recording device and were told to stand at different places in the room, pointing the devices at a blender. Toni turned it on. The person closest to the blender got the highest amount of decibels, and the person furthest away got the least.

After these things we talked about ways to protect our hearing and how you can keep yourself -and your ears- safe.