The Cheetahs Go Green!

Last week we had an exciting day of hands on learning in our class.  We were fortunate to have a special guest speaker from the City of Surrey come and talk to us about taking care of our environment.  She was very impressed with our knowledge of what is garbage, what can be recycled and what can be composted! We started off with a short video about litter and how it hurts our planet, is dangerous to animals and is ugly to look at.  She introduced us to the term, "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."  This describes the ocean that swirls around from Hawaii to Surrey and is about the size of British Columbia.  We learned that turtles eat jelly fish and sometimes they think that plastic bags that end up in the ocean are actually jelly fish and they eat them!  This makes them full so they don't eat any more and then they end up starving to death.  We also learned that birds often mistake bottle caps for food and end up eating them and dying.  Finally, we talked about how animals can get the plastic rings that hold cans together caught around their neck and this hurts them.  After our video we worked in small groups to complete a number of tasks.  Our first job was to read two statements and decide which one was true and which was false.  We were supposed to give the false ones to Mrs. Kajla and put the true ones on the board.  Here is our thinking. . . .

 Here are the ones we thought were  true! 

and here are the ones we thought  were false.

Do you agree with our thinking?


















Next, Mrs. Kajli showed us some pictures with some multiple choice answers

What did you guess as the correct answer?  If you said food wrappers for the first and plastic bags for the second one you would be right!  One way for us to help is to reduce the garbage or litter we make.

Our second task was to look at pictures of things we bring in our lunch and try to put together a "litterless" lunch.  We had to put everything that was reusable back into the lunch bag and leave everything that was garbage on the desk.  There was lots of good discussion going on!  It made us stop and think about our own lunches! 

After recess we were ready to become "litter" detectives!  Before we went outside we learned what is safe for us to pick up and what should be left for adults to get rid of.  After that the real fun began. We put on a green vest, then some special black gloves and finally we received a pair of tongs. Our job was to scan the school grounds and pick up as much garbage as we could find.

At the end of our clean up we had collected a whole white garbage bag full!  We noticed there were lots of food wrappers!  We are going to talk about how we can reduce the amount of wrappers on our playground!  Check back to see what solutions we come up with!

What a wonderful way to spend our day. . .  cleaning up the environment and spending some time outdoors learning!

Are you a litter bug or do you help take care of our planet by using recycling bags, by composting and by using the garbage cans whenever you have garbage?