Recycling

Welcome back parents and students.
This week our class has been discussing recycling and conservation of our resources. Learning about recycling is important because it is part of our TEKS ( Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills). Your student should make wise choices in the use and conservation of resources and the disposal or recycling of material.
Students have been discussing a few changes they can make at home to help recycle. We know that our landfills are getting full of materials that should be recycled. We have been exploring the thought of what would our city look like if there were no more landfills and we had to keep our waste. Our city would turn into a dumptown. Click on the highlighted word dumptown and explore and play a fun game on recycling.

Recycling takes a little bit of organization. Different materials need to be sorted together and most recycling programs want you to already have articles for recycling sorted. Students made a list of items that could be recycled together. Here are some of the categories they came up with.

1. Aluminum cans



2. Glass bottles



3. paper



4. plastic



5. steel/tin cans



6. electronics



7. organic material for compost



8. motor oil



9. batteries



10. others

Learn how to sort recycled items. Here is a fun game to help students learn how to sort and recycle everyday items. Click on Recycle Roundup.

In this activity students help Gus clean up the park by sorting the trash into the correct bins. You have two minutes to sort the most trash.

To finish up our unit on recycling we are studying natural recycling. This is commonly known as natural decomposition. Composting is the natural decomposition or breakdown of organic materials such as yard and kitchen waste. Compost process takes place naturally on earth by the normal activities of the earth's natural recyclers worms and insects. These natural recyclers require a balance in their diet between carbon and nitrogen. The chemistry of composting is very simple to understand in terms of browns and greens. brown wasts are high in carbon and green waste are high in nitrogen. The optimal balance for composting is 2 parts brown to 1 part green. Students learn to avoid adding products like meat, bones, dairy and wastes with herbicides and pesticide's.

To help students learn about compost I have attached a link to a fun game called compost 4 fun. In this game student will sort everyday items that can be turned into compost.

I hope you have enjoyed this unit, see you next week.

Ms Singleton