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Pre-Visit Activity, Grades 4+
Adapted from Project Learning Tree
Objective
Students will calculate the amount of paper they waste in
school and suggest alternate behaviors for reducing this in the future.
Materials
- Cardboard boxes or trash bags (one per student)
- Bathroom scales
Background
Paper is essentially a simple material, a mat of fibers held
together by their interconnected roughness.
It can be made from any fibrous material such as cotton or wood. Paper making was invented in China about 100
A.D. and was made one sheet at a time.
Almost all of the paper we use today comes from trees.
Although trees are a renewable resource, reusing and
recycling old paper is a good lesson on conserving the limited natural
resources we have. We will always need
new trees for paper products though, because each time paper goes through the
manufacturing process the fibers deteriorate.
Procedure
Part I
1. Ask each student
to save all the paper they would normally throw in the trash can for one
week. Boxes or bags for collection
should be conveniently placed near each desk.
This should include lunch-generated waste as well as classroom. (Smelly paper or paper with food on it should
be excluded.) Make sure you collect your
own paper too!
2. At the end of the
week, ask each student to weigh all the paper they collected. They can do this by first weighing themselves
holding the paper and recording this number and then weighing just
themselves. The numbers can then be
subtracted to find the weight of the paper.
Just putting the paper on a bathroom scale may not give an accurate
reading.
3. Create a master
list of all the students' totals. Ask
students to add the numbers to make a total for the class. Using the class total, ask each student to
solve these problems:
a. Use long division
to determine the average weight of paper waste generated by each student.
b. Use multiplication
to calculate the approximate total weight of paper waste generated by all
students in the building each week. (Use
the average weight per student found in the first problem.) Provide students with the number of students in
the school.
c. Ask some of the
staff and faculty to keep track of their paper waste for one week. Calculate an average weight. Multiply this number by the total number of
staff and faculty. Add this number to your
answer for the previous problem to get a grand total for the school.
d. What percentage of
the school total does the paper in your pile represent?
e. What percentage of
the school total does your class' total represent?
Part II
1. Have each student
separate their paper pile into two stacks:
One for paper that has been completely used and the other for paper that
could be used again for some purpose.
2. Ask the
question: "Are we wasting paper?"
3. Have small groups
of students brainstorm ways to reduce paper waste in the school. Share ideas.
4. Act on the
suggestions you consider most worthwhile, making them a part of your classroom
way of life.
5. After one week,
repeat Part I of the activity to determine the success of your paper efficiency
campaign. Have students calculate how
much less paper they threw away.
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