rough draft of script

Hello everyone and welcome to our recycling unit podcast. Our aim for this unit is to teach the next generation the importance of reducing (which is minimizing our waste(, reusing (which is using things multiple times and sometimes in new ways), and recycling (which allows us to separate certain materials that can be reprocessed into something new). Our main focus has been on engaging students through project based learning. By allowing the students to develop their own action plan,  they gain a sense of ownership over their learning. We started out the unit by giving students a base knowledge of what materials can be recycled. Students were given the opportunity to sort real objects into labeled bins.  There were some wonderful student to student conversations about materials that were in the gray area. Students were then given the opportunity to observe how much our school wastes by not recycling in the cafeteria. They were given the task to observe one sample of waste from a student lunch per day. Each student in our class collected a week’s worth of samples , and recorded it on their data sheets. They separated the waste into a variety of recyclable material categories. From there, we headed to the computer lab and generated some bar graphs to display how much of each material we have been wasting in our cafeteria. We took it a step further and combined all of our data to observe the big picture of waste from our school. This was an excellent activity to integrate technology and important math concepts with graphing. Students were able to visually see and make sense of the data they had collected. Students made excellent inferences and we had some inspiring conversations about how we could make a change in our cafeteria. The next stage of this project is to give students the power to put their discussions into action. Students collaborated in groups to create a campaign on ways to improve recycling in the cafeteria, based upon the data we collected. Most of the groups are still hard at work on a variety of creative ideas. However, one group has already pitched their idea of a compost pile, and put it into action in our classroom.