PITCH-IN CANADA
Resource Centre

Re-Think Activities
An educational Unit for children up to Grade 4
Written by Valerie Thom, B.Ed. and edited by Allard W. van Veen, APR, Fellow, CPRS

This unit has six chapters, each filled with information, ideas and projects. Words in bold and in italics are featured in the glossary which you can reach by clicking here

Skills: none

Time: one class period

Learning Objective: students will be able to outline the process of garbage collection in their community; students will consider the importance of the collection service to themselves and to their community.

NOTE: In communities with recycling programs, this Activity should be followed by REUSING AND RECYLING: ACTIVITY 7. You may also wish to do REUSING AND RECYCLING: ACTIVITY 10, which focuses on composting food scraps from household garbage.

Materials and Equipment: clean and safe samples of non-food, non-recyclable household garbage brought in by the teacher or provided by students.

Activity:

In this activity, it is not necessary that the students have a detailed understanding of solid waste management, especially the technical differences between the commonly used term dump and a sanitary landfill. A generalized understanding of the waste disposal process in their community is the learning objective.

1. Use the sample(s) to introduce the topic of household garbage to the students.
   
2. Discuss:
   
   + what is this?
   + what was it used for?
   + why was it thrown out?
   + what do you think will happen to it now?
   + what happens to things like this at your house?
   + where does the garbage from our houses go?
   
3. Have students fold a large piece of paper into four sections, then draw a story about the piece of garbage, showing the following steps. Have the students dictate their captions, if necessary:
• A garbage can at home with garbage
• The garbage cans (and recycling boxes if appropriate) waiting to be picked up
• The garbage trucks picking up the garbage
• The garbage being disposed of at the dump

RE…Think

Ask students to imagine, then illustrate, what their house would look like if there was no garbage pickup service.

Discuss with the students:

• What items would accumulate?
• What problems would this cause?
• If there was no pick-up service, how would they and their families deal with the mess in their homes?
• Did the native people of Canada many years ago have a garbage pick-up service?
• Why not?
• What happened to the things they had finished with or broken?
• Why didn’t this cause a problem in their environment?

Explain to students that a few hundred years ago, there was very little or no organized garbage collection. In the cities, people just threw their trash onto the floors of their homes or into the streets, creating unsanitary conditions that bred vermin and disease. How have our attitudes towards garbage changed in the past few hundred years so that we now need the garbage pickup and disposal service?

For Older Students

Have students look up midden. Why do archaeologists look for middens when they want to find out about the native culture of the Northwest Coast Indians?

Have students look up tells. What do these Middle East mounds tell us about ancient solid waste disposal methods?

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Click here to return to the Index for Chapter 4 and more activities

Click here to return to the Index for Re-Think