Fun Activities

On The Job

Community and Health - GARBAGE COLLECTOR

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Make your own worm farm

PrimaryPrimary MiddleMiddle

Personal and social capability
Australian Curriculum General Capability: Personal and Social Capability
Australian Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Sustainability


You will be surprised at how many food scraps we throw out each day in our households that could be used to make rich soil to help our Australian poor soils.

Stuff you will need:

1. Solid polystyrene vegetable container (they have these at Coles or Woolworths for broccoli)
2. Something to make a hole with
3. Newspaper
4. Some soil
5. Food scraps
6. Worms (you will need to buy these worms at the local plant nursery or look up "Worm Farms" in Google for your local area)
7. Hessian bag - ask the local green grocer or grocery shop
8. An empty ice cream container
9. Some bricks (or something to place the container on)
10. Small pebbles

Worms from wormfarm

What to do:

1. Get your polystyrene container and make a small hole in the bottom at one end. This should only be the size of a pencil.

2. Line the container with the small pebbles and then put on a layer of newspaper.

3. Next place some soil from your garden.

4. Then some food scraps. Add another layer of newspaper.

5. Add the worms and then cover with more newspaper and the hessian bag. This will keep in the moisture and keep out the light.

6. Place the container on some bricks or an old table or if you are doing this at school, a side desk.

7. Place the empty ice cream container under the hole to collect the moisture from this re-cycling process.

8. Leave the container undisturbed for about 2 to 3 weeks. Collect the moisture from the ice cream container.

9. The moisture from the ice cream container is rich in nutrients. Dilute by 50% with water and then add to plants in your home or school garden.

What you will see:

When this period of time has elapsed, look at the container and you will see rich soil. Place the contents of the container on a large table covered in newspaper. Gradually take off the soil. The worms will go further down to avoid the light.

When the soil and worms are separated, start your worm farm again. You will have lots of fun and more importantly help our environment.

Online

Rubbish Awareness

icon_p.gif (196 bytes)Primary icon_m.gif (211 bytes)Middle High schoolSecondary

NumeracyAustralian Curriculum General Capability: Numeracy

Australian Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Sustainability

1. You have approached your school Principal to see if each class and the school as a whole could become more rubbish aware. S/he suggests that students need to see the amount of rubbish created in their households first so the students have a better understanding of rubbish creation at a micro-level before tackling the school.

2. You are to create a survey asking each student to work out the type and amount of rubbish generated within each household. Work out

a. Amount to landfill (red bin - rubbish)

b. Amount to recycling

c. Amount to compost

Get the other students to create a visual account of the things thrown into the rubbish.

How much rubbish does each student’s household create every week (approximately) - create a tally to record this each Monday on a portable whiteboard.

Approximately how much of this could be recycled but wasn't? Record this as a fraction (Use pictures and visuals if needed).

3. Report your findings to the Principal.

4. Investigate BTN on Recycling at School

BTN

 

5. School rubbish.

On a large piece of plastic, after lunch one day, empty one school rubbish bin. Divide the plastic into 3 sections: rubbish, recycling, compost

Teachers - make sure that each student in the class has gloves. This can be dirty work.

Estimate the amount of "true" rubbish by looking at the rubbish on the plastic sheet. 1/3? 2/3? Less

Estimate the amount of recycling - anything plastic? 1/3? 2/3? Less.

Estimate the amount of material that should go to compost - banana peels, orange peels, left over sandwiches. 1/3? 2/3? Less

6. If this result is the same each day, what would happen to the amount of true rubbish for the week?

Ask the Principal/Bursar how much they pay to the council to deliver and pick up rubbish bins (it does depend on the amount - number of bins!) over the course of a year. Based on your research, estimate the savings to the school if students had 3 different types of bins to put their rubbish into - true rubbish (red), recycling (yellow) and compost (green).

Sometimes, schools can negotiate with the recycling companies to provide $$ back to the school for a certain amount of recyclables - particularly cans.

The green bin contents need to become compost. Settling up compost heaps - closed or open is easy to do and could be a class project.

 

Optional Extra

Look at the following website: Plastic Free July in Action - showing how other schools have gone about this...

Investigation

Plastic Free July

7.

How would you go about changing your school to be plastic free?

 

 


Time is money!

icon_p.gif (196 bytes)Primary icon_m.gif (211 bytes)Middle

NumeracyAustralian Curriculum General Capability: Numeracy

1. You are a garbage collector. You get paid per day, not by the hour so you like to get your route done as fast as possible so that you can go home as early as you can.

In your route (A) you have 153 houses that need their bins emptied. You manage to do this in an average of around 5 hours.


Part 1 –
How many houses can you collect from in …
An hour?
10 minutes?

Part 2 -

Your garbage truck has a capacity of 5000L.

I
f each bin you collect has a capacity of 140L, how many houses will it take for you to collect before you fill your truck?

How many times in TOTAL would you need to empty the tray before completing your trip?

If you have a compactor within your truck that squashes the waste to a quarter of its size, can you complete your rounds in one trip? Why/Why not? Justify with mathematical reasoning
Garbage Truck

In route B, there are 208 houses; route C has 177 houses while route D has 148 houses.

Calculate Part 1 and Part 2 for each of these routes.

 

Ethics, Zabbaleen and Recycling

High schoolSecondary

Ethical Understanding Australian Curriculum General Capability: Ethical Understanding

PhilosophyPhilosophy

Cooperative LearningCooperative Learning Activity

1. Watch the following videos:

a. Zabbaleen: Trash Town: on the outskirts of Cairo. The Zabbaleen are mostly Coptic Christians who are the garbage collectors of Cairo. (25 minutes)
https://youtu.be/D0s7WsoC528

 

b. Tens of thousands of people live in Zabbaleen, on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, they all make a living out of recycling the entire capital city’s refuse. Their whole town is practically a giant dump and it provides them with almost everything they need: from kids’ toys to fodder for livestock. Even their pigs play an important part in recycling food waste. Most important of all though, the dump provides livelihoods for the people of Zabbaleen.

Website: https://rtd.rt.com/films/zabbaleen-trash-town/

Zabbaleen

2. Read the following article: Cairo's Zabbaleen garbage collectors: Egypt's diamond in the rough Reading

Global Risks Insight

3. After viewing and reading: Describe how this group of people have created one of the world's greenest waste-management systems.

Community of Inquiry

4. In pairs, come up with 4 questions - one for each quadrant. The questions for thinking are the hardest to come up with - but that is what we are aiming for.

Philosophy Quadrant

5. List all the questions on the board and put your names next to your question.
6. Group the questions – the ones that are the same or similar – together.

7. Discussion

Start a discussion with the most asked question. Are there any ethical questions? Start with those first.

8. Make sure you follow the rules of Philosophy in Schools:

  • Only one person speaks at a time

  • Pay attention to the person who is speaking

  • Give other people a chance to speak

  • Build upon other people’s ideas

  • No put-downs (Source: A/Prof. Phil Cam)


9. Discussion should involve you in critical, creative and caring thinking:

Critical Creative Caring
give reasons
explore
disagreement
consider implications
apply criteria
weigh evidence
generate questions
raise suggestions
imagine alternatives
formulate criteria
make connections
build on ideas
listen to other's points of view
consider other's reasons
explore disagreements considerately
build on other's ideas
explore other's opinions
help to synthesise suggestions

10. Provide Closure: Example: Get the students to reflect in their journals about the plight of the Zabbaleen people and the injustice/justice of their circumstance. Or how the students felt when they were stigmised.

Teacher: Leave the questions on the board or copy them so that the other unanswered questions can be addressed in the next lessons.


Websites, Games & Apps

Adventures of Herman - the worm
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ICT Capability Australian Curriculum General Capability: ICT Capability



Interesting web site with facts as well as games.
Adventures of Herman the worm
Protect the Environment: Kids in Action
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ICT Capability Australian Curriculum General Capability: ICT Capability



Experiments at home (make your own paper, acid rain experiment), Dream house made by high school students, Tips and simple games.
Protect the Environment
Recycling Tips

icon_p.gif (196 bytes) Primary icon_m.gif (211 bytes)Middle

ICT Capability Australian Curriculum General Capability: ICT Capability

Recycling Tips



Download this free app for an android smartphone - it gives you lots of tips about recycling

Recycling tips
Clean up the Park - A Recycling Game icon_p.gif (196 bytes) Primary star.gif (1096 bytes)star_half.gif (588 bytes)

ICT Capability Australian Curriculum General Capability: ICT Capability


Uses Macromedia Flash. Very simple game. Only younger students might play this game.
Clean up the Park
Environmental Quiz

icon_m.gif (211 bytes)Middle

ICT Capability Australian Curriculum General Capability: ICT Capability


Environmental Quiz

WebQuests for Community & Health

Solid Waste WebQuest

 High SchoolSecondary

Solid Waste WQ

In this WebQuest, students will explore solid waste and recycling in more depth. They will gather information on what materials makes up the waste stream, what the options are for recycling or re-use, and the environmental impacts of various disposal options.

What are you doing for the environment?

If you have any stories or photographs of successes with re-cycling, we would love to hear from you!
Email us and we will put this information on the web site.

 

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