Institutio
Excellentia
Carey Baptist Grammar
TRASH ON YOUR BACK® 5 Day Challenge
In May last year I came across a short
article on the Green Lane Diary website
inviting teachers to get involved in ‘Trash
on Your Back’®. The thought of my class
carrying all of their non-perishable rubbish
around on their backs for 5 days seemed
to be a very direct and innovative way to
increase their awareness of their own
personal impact on the planet in terms of
waste. So I registered the Year 4s and then
the idea of an integrated Maths unit began
to form.
For certain items, we also measured the
volume (using MAB blocks) and capacity.
At the end of this unit, the students completed a reflection and commented on
what they would now do differently. Their
comments included:
When June came around, my colleague
and I handed out the compostable Trash
Bags and we named each child a ‘Trash
Warrior.’ 5 days later, the students came
back to school, their bags filled with their
‘trash’ and the Maths adventure began.
First we classified all of the waste, sorting
it into recyclable and non recyclable. This
brought about many discussions about
why manufacturers would choose to package their foods in non-recyclable materials
in the first place!
Then, once sorted, we counted and tallied
all of the items in a table. The students
converted their data into fractions, decimals and percentages of the total trash
and created graphs to show their data. The
students really enjoyed creating pie charts
using their iPads and reflected on their results and made observations from what the
data showed.
They then used Woolworths online to calculate the cost of their waste.This exploration of packaging and cost between single
serve items and bulk items created a lot of
discussion about the savings made in money and waste through buying in bulk.
After this we then decided to explore where
the food had travelled from and we calculated food miles using Google Maps. We
also looked at the directions a truck would
have to follow to travel from the main factory to our local supermarket.
54 SwitchOn
“I highly recommend the real world
practical learning experience that is
Trash on Your Back.”
Kathryn Mann