Recycling

One of the main goals of our study of the ahupua`a of Manoa is to recognize the relationship that people have to the land and how they work together to use and protect the resources that the land provides.  We want to look at how people in this ahupua`a of Manoa lived and worked together in the past and how they live and work together today. To start, we decided to focus on own smaller community of Mid-Pacific Elementary School.  When Mr. K left, we no longer had a recycling program in the elementary school.  We decided to fill that need by taking over the recycling of cans and bottles and adding paper recycling.  In addition to filling that immediate need in our community and helping to keep our campus clean, we also looked at how our recycling efforts affect our Hawai`i community and our global community by studying about how recycling benefits us.  To prepare for recycling, our students have been gathering information to present our recycling program to the rest of the school.  We didn’t want to just collect everyone’s recycling without educating our community on why it is important to recycle and how we can avoid recycling altogether by reducing usage and re-using these resources.

As a class we came up with questions to research like Why should we recycle?  What happens when we recycle?  What would happen if we didn’t recycle?  What kinds of products are made out of the recycled goods?  What can we recycle? We will be recycling plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and white paper so we split into those three groups. Because all the third and fourth grade classes are in charge of recycling and we  felt that it was important for everyone to share this information with rest of the school, we decided to divide up all the classes in the elementary school and visit each class individually.  Our class is in charge of educating Ms. Field’s 1-2 multi-age class and Mr. Black’s 5th grade class. Because these are such varied ages, our groups had to carefully consider how they were going to present their information to each particular audience. Our groups have chosen to do either keynote presentations or prepare posters to help share their information. Some groups are even making hand-outs (printed on recycled paper, of course).   
I know that you would love to see these presentations, but because we will be doing our presentations in the other classrooms to teach that class, I worry that it might be a distraction. But not to worry, because I am very excited to try making a pod-cast and I think our presentations are a perfect opportunity.  We will film our presentations and make them into pod-casts that you can download and watch.  We will be presenting next Friday, but I don’t expect the pod-casts to be up and watch-able until at least the next week.
As an appropriate aside, we had a guest speaker, Brian Kealoha from Energy Solutions, come speak to the third-fifth grades.  Mr. Kealoha talked to the kids about how we get energy and how they could reduce their energy usage.  We even got some prizes because we were so knowledgeable about how energy use effects our environment.  He asked the kids to do some homework, so I made it officially part of our weekly homework (instead of our reading assignment).  The children are supposed to list all the ways that they use energy (electricity), how they could reduce that usage, and then discuss it with you.

Posted on October 5, 2007 6:48 AM | Permalink