Today I spent an hour at my son’s school with about 40 first graders talking about trash! The Great American Teach In is a time for parents and community members to come into the schools and show the kids what we do for a living. I love talking to the kids but I was a bit intimidated when I drove up…there was a garbage truck, a helicopter, and a police car in the parking lot! And here I come with my reusable shopping bag full of goodies. I was afraid they wouldn’t be interested but they loved it.
I decided that this year I would talk about the 3R’s – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! The media tends to push recycling but they don’t mention the other 2 R’s. I started by asking kids if they knew where their trash goes to…that big hole in the ground we call a landfill…and told them that hundreds of years from now their trash will still be there! Then I talked about the Mobius Strip (the recycling symbol) and what it means. Did you know that it was created in 1970 by a 23 year old college student; Gary Anderson?
I showed the kids some simple ways to reduce and reuse their waste.
-Reusable bags
-Reusable water bottles
-Using both sides of the paper
-Using trash for craft projects
I even prepared a small craft project for the kids. I took some of our cardboard boxes from the recycling bin (cereal, pop tarts, mac-n-cheese, etc) and cut them to the size of a bookmark. Each kid got to draw and color a picture on the backside and I finished them off by adding a ribbon to the top. It was so cute to see the kids all excited about playing with trash!
I can’t wait for next year to visit again; I wonder what I’ll talk about then?
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Sounds like you had it all figured out 🙂
Much more exciting than my reading to kids LOL
FYI – I linked back to you on my blog post about GATI… 🙂