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

OUR GARBAGE: ACTIVITY 8 -   What Is In Our Garbage?                                                                    2 – 3

Skills: counting, grouping, graphing, measuring weight, estimating volume    

Time: one class period

Learning Objective: students will be able to divide a typical collection of household garbage into groups; students will realize that garbage has volume and weight.

NOTE: This Activity can be followed by OUR GARBAGE: ACTIVITY 9, or OUR GARBAGE: ACTIVITY 10 which focuses on composting to reduce and recycle household waste.

Materials and Equipment: samples of different types of garbage, including paper, plastic, glass, and metal garbage; strong bags to hold the sorted garbage; scales.

Activity:

    1. Ask each student to bring one piece of garbage to school, from their household garbage OR bring in appropriate items yourself.
    2. Discuss the items.
    3. Help the students to sort the garbage into groups, depending on what the item is made of, such as a glass group, a paper group, a plastic group, a food scraps group, etc.
    4. Count up the items in each group.
    5. Make a graph, using cutouts to represent the number of items in each group.
    6. Discuss which group has the most items, and why.
    7. Put each group into a separate bag, and determine which group fills up the bag the most, i.e., which group has the largest volume.
    8. Have students graph the volumes.
    9. Weigh each bag—which bag weighs the most?
    10. Have students graph the weights.

RE…Think

Help students realize that garbage has weight (is heavy) and volume (takes up space). (Of course, in urban areas the garbage would be compacted if collected in a compactor truck, and would be crushed by bulldozers in the landfill. However, the volume of flattened garbage is still considerable.) These factors cause disposal problems, as it is increasingly difficult to find enough space for our garbage, and it is expensive to take heavy garbage by truck to these sites.

Ask students to suggest ways in which the amount of garbage in each group could be reduced so that the amount of garbage going into our landfill sites would be reduced.

Have students illustrate their ideas.

NOTE: Activities in the REUSING AND RECYCLING theme section focus in greater detail on ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle our garbage.

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

Click here to return to the Index for Re-Think