It's Just Trash....or Is It?
5/1/2021
When our Beluga class celebrated Earth Day, I thought a week would be enough to satisfy the children’s interest, but it turns out that we were just getting started! After a general overview of basic things each of us could do to help the earth, we have begun exploring topics such as gardening, recycling, composting, and vermiculture (worms)! We spent oodles of time talking about garbage. As a society, we throw away so much stuff, and young children (and many adults, too) rarely think about what happens to it after the garbage man takes it away. As a class we talked a little bit about what happens to garbage that isn’t recycled or composted. We discussed the concept of landfills, and how they are not an endless option for trash disposal. The children were also concerned about the amount of trash they had cleaned up on the playground and parking lot, so we made "Please do not Litter" signs to remind everyone to pick up after themselves. In order to more thoroughly investigate the concepts of reduce, reuse and recycle, we invited the children to bring in some of their recyclable trash – plastics, cans made of aluminum or tin, cardboard boxes, and we also explored the kinds of things they brought in their lunches. We sorted by the main types of things which we brought in (metal, paper and plastic), we looked at the different codes on the plastic items, and we watched a few YouTube videos about different kinds of recycling. One of the most popular things we did was to see what the children could create with the recycled items. It was wonderful to see their minds engaged in the task of creating something new to play with from what they had classified as garbage. Another idea which has captured the children’s attention is the idea that food scraps can be turned into soil. One day we collected all of the children’s vegetable waste such as banana peels, orange peels, and apple cores in an empty ice cream bucket. The children didn’t think that there was very much, and truly they were correct. I pointed out, however, that we were only 12 people; and then we wondered how much waster would the whole school produce in a day? In order to answer that question, we created a Green Food Waste bucket for every classroom, along with a list of what could and could not go into the bucket. At the end of the collection day, the children were excited to see how much we had collected! We weighed each bucket on a scale and then added up all the amounts. After converting our grams to pounds we discovered that we had collected almost exactly 5 pounds of fruit and vegetable waste which filled 2 one-gallon ice cream buckets! Perhaps that doesn’t seem like very much, but when you multiply it by the 150+ days we have been in school, we decided that if we wanted to take better care of the earth, it would probably be a good idea for PNA to build a compost bin for our garden area on the playground!
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Melissa SmithMs. Smith has a degree in Early Childhood Education and has taught kindergarten for many years. Alaska has been home to Ms. Smith for 28 years, and she can't imagine living anywhere else! She has four children, a dog and two cats. She loves reading, camping, gardening, and genealogy! Archives
April 2021
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