Activity Introduction
Quick summary: In this activity students look at how different types of waste are recycled. Students begin the activity by exploring the properties of a range of waste items and then go on to investigate how aluminium cans are recycled by looking at how the processes and stages involved with can recycling.
This lesson has been developed as part of the Schools Recycle Right Challenge for Planet Ark’s National Recycling Week. Register your lesson or other activities so they can be counted towards the national achievement and to receive other free support materials.
Learning intentions:
- Students understand that waste items contain a variety of materials.
- Students learn that waste materials need to be sorted so the materials can be recycled (or composted) and only the real rubbish will go to landfill.
- Students recognise the stages and processes involved with aluminium can recycling.
- Students discover that the application of heats melts some materials.
21st century skills:
Australian Curriculum Mapping
Year 3 Science:
- Science knowledge helps people to understand the effect of their actions (ACSHE051)
- A change of state between solid and liquid can be caused by adding or removing heat (ACSSU046)
- Represent and communicate ideas and findings in a variety of ways such as diagrams, physical representations and simple reports (ACSIS060)
Year 3 English:
- Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive texts demonstrating increasing control over text structures and language features and selecting print,and multimodal elements appropriate to the audience and purpose (ACELY1682)
Syllabus Outcomes: ST2-11LW, ST2-4WS, ST2-12MW, EN2-2A.
Topic: National Recycling Week
Time required: 60 mins
Level of teacher scaffolding: Medium – will need to help students interpret the aluminium and second manufacturing recycling video.
Resources required: Clean waste materials for students to handle, such as plastic bottles and tubs, aluminium cans, and glass bottles or jars (it will be useful for this activity to ensure that there is at least one item made from aluminium, however make sure there are no sharp edges on cans or tins). Access to student worksheet.
There’s an app for that: iRecycle – iRecycle provides access to more than 1,600,000 ways to recycle over 350 materials.
Homework and extension opportunities: Includes opportunities for extension or homework.
Keywords: Rubbish, reuse, recycle, waste, compost, aluminium, steel, glass, plastic, code, solid, liquid, melt, molten, temperature.
Cool Australia’s curriculum team continually reviews and refines our resources to be in line with changes to the Australian Curriculum.
These Planet Ark resources were developed by Cool Australia with funding from the Alcoa Foundation.
Teacher Preparation