How school waste led to imaginative robot creations!
By Mrs Smale and Ms Parkes’ 4/5 class
In week six, our school was visited by Jo from KESAB environmental solutions, who alongside the Young Leaders, completed an audit of our school waste and provided some valuable advice about reducing, reusing and recycling our combined waste. Students in our classroom were very keen to begin implementing some changes as quickly as possible.
A brain storming session in Geography led to a class agreement on trailing a ‘Nude Food’ day later this term. Discussions were held about how to reduce our waste and many students volunteered to complete a waste audit of our rubbish to see where we could start making immediate changes.
Students came across the problem of straws mixed in with the 10c recycling and they discussed what needed to be done to prevent this from happening in the future then came up with a solution to store the plastic straws which would prevent them from ending up in the ocean. All juice and milk box straws will now be placed in one 600ml plastic bottle which was found in our 10c recycling.
The eagerness of the students to reduce our waste and contribute towards sustainable living practices has prompted topics for their persuasive writing in English, provided opportunities for surveys, data collection and graphical comparisons in Mathematics, Photography and Digital Media displays in Digital Arts and helped identify the effects people have on the environment in Geography.
“Is nude food beneficial to the environment and our school” was the topic for a brainstorming session in our class. The care, respect and passion our students have for our environment is absolutely wonderful to see. We received such amazing responses from the students. Some of them being:
- The ocean would be cleaner and the animals would be safer.
- The chickens at school would be safer as they wouldn’t have rubbish fly into their environment.
- It looks untidy with rubbish everywhere. Outsiders out think more highly of our school and we would have a better reputation.
- Staff and students would be happier.
- Nude food would reduce our waste.
But this isn’t all just about waste, we have reused recycling items to create robots during Mathematics and Design and Technology.
This term during Mathematics a focus has been comparing the areas of regular and irregular shapes by informal means and connecting three dimensional objects with two dimensional representations. To wrap up our unit plan the students task was to draw labelled 2D diagram of the robot which shows the various features of the robot, explain which materials should be used for each part of the robot then create a 3D model of their robot. Once the robots are complete, incorporating English and persuasive texts, the students will then write a persuasive poster convincing the reader that their robot is the best. Some rules when planning their robot designs were that the robot was to be no taller than 30 centimetres and they had to use at least four different 3D objects in their design. What a wonderful way to incorporate Mathematics and Design and Technology. The students absolutely loved getting crafty and using their imagination to create such amazing masterpieces.
Here are a few photos of our wonderful robotic creations:
