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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Earth and space. The student knows that earth materials and products made from these materials are important to everyday life.

Provide students a prompt that allows them to weigh multiple factors when determining how human impact can be limited by proper disposal. For example, students are planning for a party and need to decide whether to use paper plates or regular reusable plates. Students will need to consider how they would prioritize trash, recycling, and water use for cleaning up. Students should write an argument that explains why they chose to use paper plates or reusable plates and how their choice helped to limit human impact. Students might say that using paper plates helps conserve water because they don't have to clean them. They might also say that using reusable plates is better because it keeps more trash out of the landfill. There is not a perfectly right answer to this prompt. The goal is to get students thinking about the complexity involved in making decisions about how to use materials.
 

to preserve or protect something

the act or process of throwing away or getting rid of something

to process something (such as liquid body waste, glass, or cans) in order to regain material for human use; to reuse or make a substance available for reuse for biological activities through natural processes of biochemical degradation (decomposition) or modification

diminish or decrease in size, amount, extent, or number

to use again especially in a different way or after reclaiming or reprocessing

Research

Weiland, Mary, Ann Boekhoff, and Tami Staloch-Schultz. “Methods & Strategies: From Landfills to Robots.” Science and Children 49, no. 7 (2012): 72–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43747339. 

Summary: In this article, the author outlines a lesson completed in an elementary classroom meant to increase awareness of how much waste we produce and encourage students and families to reduce the amount of waste they produce by recycling and reusing items. Families were given a questionnaire to determine how much recycling and reusing they already do at home. Students were asked to bring used items from home to make a class "landfill." This landfill was used to show students how much waste we produce and provide students with items they could use to create something new and purposeful. Students observed the benefits and cons of different packaging of everyday items as they sorted the items in their landfill into three categories: recyclable, reusable, and garbage. Students then practiced using the engineering process to build something new that could meet human needs using the items. Families were given a post-project questionnaire with the same questions as the pre-project questionnaire, which showed increased willingness to reduce, reuse, recycle, and decrease the amount of waste produced at home and in the classroom.