Brief Description Objectives Materials and Resources Activity Description

• Grade Level: Elementary, Middle School, High School

• Subject Area: Social Studies, Math

Brief Description

    Students participate in their local area's Earth Day activities. As students collect trash they keep track of the types of articles they pick up. At the end of Earth Day activities, students aggregate their data to develop whole-class statistics of what they found.
Objectives

    Students will:

• Participate in an activity to benefit their community.
• Gather and analyze data from a real-world situation.

Materials and Resources

    In developing our lessons and activities, we made some assumptions about the hardware and software that would be available in the classroom for teachers who visit the LETSNet Website. We assume that teachers using our Internet-based lessons or activities have a computer with the necessary hardware components (mouse, keyboard, and monitor) as well as a World Wide Web browser. In the section below, we specify any "special" hardware or software requirements for a lesson or activity (in addition to those described above) and the level of Internet access required to do the activity.

1. Special hardware requirements: None.
2. Special software requirements: None.
3. Internet access: None.
4. Other materials: Earth Day clean up materials, such as gloves and trash bags, and tally sheets for students to track the trash they collect (see below).

Activity Description

Note: Be sure that students exercise care in participating in any trash clean-up activities. Students should wear protective gloves (preferably gardening gloves that may be reused rather than plastic, disposable gloves). You will also want to encourage students not to waste garbage bag space. Have teams of students fan out over an spot, placing a garbage bag in a central area, and then return to the bag with their trash. This will avoid the irony of using and throwing away twenty garbage bags to collect a small amount of trash.

• Talk about Earth Day activities that have been planned in your community. Discuss the history of Earth Day. Discuss the full plans for this unit, including the fact that students will be taking action on the data that they gather.

• Let students know that they will be undertaking a scientific study of the types of things that become litter and that they will be responsible for recording what they find.

• Provide students with a pencils and tally sheets to record what they find.
  Categories on the tally sheet might include:
  • Cigarette butts: Marlboro, Camel, Other
  • Soda cans/bottles: Coke, Pepsi, Other
  • Fast food wrappers/containers/etc.: McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, Wendy's, KFC, Other
  • Newspapers/magazines

• When the clean-up is over, have students compile the data from their tally sheets. Students should create a classroom report of their findings using statistics appropriate for their grade level. Students should identify the major sources and types of litter that were found in the community and note the percentage of litter that is recyclable.

Back to Earth Day Trash Survey Unit Lesson Plans