STEP 1 Environmental Awareness and Care - Junior Infants Mrs. Marlborough - recycling in our classroom

We looked at the area of caring for the local environment. The local environment in this instance was our classroom.

For Junior Infants, this was new concept for them to follow and learn about. So to help them understand what recycling is all about we looked at some video clips and powerpoint presentations on caring for the local environment with emphasis on recycling in the classroom.Some children had heard about recycling and compost bins.

Recycling logo which we have in our class.

So to do our bit for the environment,
We first looked at the types of drink containers that we bring to school everyday.
Of the 16 children in the class, all have reusable drink containers which is fantastic.
100% - a great result for recycling.

Here are the children with their reusable drinks containers


                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                               


Next we looked at our lunch boxes and how we can dispose of the leftovers, wrapping and packaging.
We were able to categorise what was in the lunch boxes. Most lunch boxes consisted mainly of fruit,  vegetables, yogurts and sandwiches.
The 3 most popular fruits were bananas, apples and melons.
Cucumber and peppers were also popular.

The children learned that any leftovers from their fruit and vegetables could be put into the compost bin.This would be collected by the green schools committee and taken to the composter where the leftovers would be converted with the help of the worms into compost.


See attached some photos of fruit and vegetables leftovers that we put into the compost bin.

Yogurts were also very popular. It was explained to the children that these little cartons can be recycled but before putting them into the recycling bin they must be washed out.

Here we are with our yogurt cartons

Here are our washed cartons

This is our recycling bin which includes paper and clean plastic yogurt cartons.

We noticed that there one item in some lunchboxes that could not be recycled  - tin foil.
So this is perhaps one area where we as a class can improve on

The children through our investigations have an excellent grasp of the concept of recycling and from our observations every child in the class has at least one if not two
 recyclable items in their lunch box. We need to keep this momentum up and hopefully the children will pass on what they have learned to their home environment and local community.