After returning from the term break, the neighbourhood was delighted to receive a special parcel from our old pirate friend, Grey Beard! We received some jars filled with plastic objects which he’d collected from a local beach, as well as an encrypted letter that said “help get rid of plastic”. For those of you who may have forgotten who Grey Beard is, he is the environmentalist in our pirate story who has a submarine and has spent most of his life cleaning up the ocean.
In any event, this secret message prompted us to go out and hunt down any plastic rubbish that might have been left on our school grounds. After collecting the rubbish, we sorted based on observable qualities (paper, plastic, metal, etc.) and created a tally to keep track of how many individual artefacts we’d collected. We were all surprised to learn how many ways plastic is used in all sorts of food packaging. Tallies will continue to be a useful tool for sorting and counting in the children’s future maths explorations.
The children have been fascinated to learn more about the impact of plastics on the environment, including how single-use plastics can harm wildlife, pollute waterways, and generally contribute to environmental degradation. They are developing an understanding of the different ways we can care for the planet and preserve natural habitats while also recognising the unique role plastic plays in our daily lives. Overall, they have certainly developed a sense of responsibility for their community and the environment, excitedly notifying us when they notice rubbish anywhere in the school. We will continue to explore the properties of plastics and try to recognise why they are so widely used in everyday products (due to their versatility, durability, and affordability). We have also begun to hypothesise about why plastic makes up such a sizeable chunk of the litter uncovered outdoors.
At the end of every day we have been sharing the books we take home with others and giving recommendations to encourage others to borrow them next. Thank you to everyone for supporting this process and encouraging your little readers at home. Hopefully, you’ll start to notice their growing bank of known high-frequency words helping them to decode new texts and build confidence in reading, as this has been a big focus of our guided reading groups.
