Activity Introduction
Quick summary: In this lesson, students will collect data on their own recycling habits and use this to evaluate and reflect upon recycling and waste across the school.
This activity has been developed in partnership with Visy. For over 60 years Visy has been striving for sustainability, reducing the amount of waste going to landfill by collecting recyclable materials and recycling them into new paper and packaging products. Click here to find out more about Visy and their innovative work in recovering and transforming recyclable materials into new products to preserve our earth’s precious resources.
Learning intentions:
- Students will be able to use arrays to find the approximate amount of recycled material that could be recovered by their class each week.
- Students will understand which waste items can be put in the recycle bin.
21st century skills:
Australian Curriculum Mapping
Content descriptions:
Year 2 Mathematics
- Recognise and represent multiplication as repeated addition, groups and arrays (ACMNA031).
Syllabus outcomes: MA1‑1WM, MA1‑2WM, MA1‑3WM, MA1‑6NA.
General capabilities: Numeracy.
Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability.
Relevant parts of Year 2 achievement standards:
They represent multiplication and division by grouping into sets.
Topic: Sustainability, Waste.
Unit of work: Bright Sparks – Primary Mathematics.
Time required: 60 mins.
Level of teacher scaffolding: Low – teacher will model process explicitly before students complete task.
Resources required:
- Device capable of presenting a video to the class.
- Student Worksheet (printed, one per student).
- Class rubbish bin.
- Tongs and/or latex-free gloves (for each student).
- Recycling categories poster.
- Learning intentions and success criteria display (optional).
- Magnetic counters/tiles or regular counters/tiles and blu-tac.
Keywords: Waste, recycling, plastic, firm plastic, soft plastic, cardboard, paper, steel, aluminium, environment.
The information and statistics included in this document are approximate and have been simplified for educational/illustrative purposes. They should not be relied upon for any other purpose.
Cool Australia’s curriculum team continually reviews and refines our resources to be in line with changes to the Australian Curriculum.
Teacher Preparation
