Recycling/environment

[Guest]

Hi

We are covering this topic for a week after easter. Anyone got any good tried and tested ideas

Thanks

[Guest]

A week doesn't seem all that long, but how about starting up a compost heap? You could do a mini one in a 2l plastic drinks bottle if you don't have space outside (enough for the children to see decomposition at anyrate!).

Could you recycle drinks bottles to make skittles by filling bottom with sand or stones?

Or maybe make your own musical washing line with old piping etc?

Lots of opps for citizenship and talking about how to care for the environment.

Can't think of any suitable texts for little people, but I'm there must be some out there.

You may find some useful ideas if you look at the eco-schools website.

[Guest]

There's a book called 'Dinosaurs and all that Rubbish' by Michael Foreman.

 

I have a box in my classroom for recycling paper and the children are getting quite good at using it. Could you have a recycling centre as your role-play area where children had to sort materials e.g. all the plastic bottles together, then all the newspapers etc?

 

Or bury a crisp packet and a mushroom and dig them up after a week or two and look at which has changed. You could cheat by adding 'garotta' (you can get this in garden centres; it helps to speed up the composting process) but I don't know how safe this is and how much difference it would make in such a short period of time.

 

Make a wormery - worms - the ultimate recyclers!

 

Use rubbish to make a rubbish monster. This could either be 2D with papers etc cut up or if you were feeling really clever a 3D sculpture. These could both be made with rubbish found in the local environment.

 

Design and make recycling/rubbish bins.

 

Sorry - none of these ideas are tried or tested!

[Posy]

Like the idea of burying crisp packet and mushroom Moose.

We had the dustmen and dust cart to visit. We collected rubbish and took bags of mixed rubbish out to dust cart and the dustmen sorted it for us telling the children what we could re-cycle newspapers could go to paper bank, glass/plastic ditto and so on. You need to check the H&S and do a risk assessment.(Guess who forgot until the morning before!!) The children were fascinated by the dust lorry and the visit led onto making mashing machines with re cycled boxes etc, painting/drawing germs and lots of frenzied hand washing!

Barb

[Marion]

We have used Dinosaurs and all that rubbish and the children love it.

Also we have compost bins where we put our apple cores and left over fruit from snack time hopefully in future we can use it on my raised bed if the head stops stealing my compost

[Guest]

Thanks everyone!!

[Guest]

Garotta is supposedly perfectly organic, so I don't think would be harmful with children (as with anything, use with caution).

My children LOVED our 'worm world', which we kept for half a (old) term and released the contents of last week (where are they? why do we have to let them go?)

There is also a fantastic book called Window, which I think is great for illustrating (it's a picture book) how humans affect the environment. It's all centred around the view from a window over the years, beginning with the view with a parent holding a baby, in the foreground. It moves on, and as the child grows (illustrated by numbered birthday cards and the likes), the view changes as developers etc. move in. Well worth a look. I've done it with Reception, where they then do the view from one of their windows at home, which I've then added strips of paper for the window frame

[Guest]

Eco-Schools

Have you tried looking here?

If you register you get free CDroms which come quite quickly. There's the opportunity to go for whole-school awards at bronze, silver or Green Flag levels.