By Janet Ullman, Highland Community Waste Partnership
I’ve been busy getting ready to go out to schools this year for the Highland Community Waste Partnership, to talk about the 3Rs: how we reduce waste, recycle materials and reuse stuff.
Learning needs to be fun, so I have some games worked out to show how we sort materials, transport stuff and how pollution spreads. What children want is a world fit to live in and that is down to all of us working together. I can go in and talk about why we reduce, reuse and recycle, but children need to see these things happening around them at home, at school and everywhere – that includes shops, offices, council buildings, farms, factories and so on.
When I was growing up, recycling was still seen as a fringe activity. Now recycling and reuse are no longer just for the ‘green brigade’, but we can’t stop working towards a brighter and better future for our children. We need to get to a point where renewable energy is standard, burning oil and gas been consigned to the history books and plastic is used sparingly for those situations where it is best used, where its durability and strength are best appreciated.
Our concern for the environment crosses all areas of the curriculum in schools. In terms of literacy and language there is a whole range of debates and information to pore over and understand. One of my favourite things is to sit down with a class, of any age group and try to answer their questions about being more sustainable. I like to have a bit of a debate with them and listen to their questions. Quite often they can see more clearly than us adults the solutions that are needed.
Children want the story and history of how things got to be how they are today. In fact, through learning about waste and recycling you can cover a huge chunk of every subject from the science of materials, to the maths of getting a truck load of rubbish to an incinerator with the health and wellbeing implications of pollution. One thing is for sure – we are seeing a better-informed generation becoming our future hope for a more sensible tomorrow.
So, if you’d like me to visit your school just contact me at mail@broadfordandstrath.org and I will set up a date and time with you. I will bring my box of activities, my magnet, sieves and sorters, my toy trucks and lots more, all in the name of making learning about the environment as fun as it can be.
Happy 3Rs to you all.