Recycling assemblies and workshops
Assemblies
Our assemblies are designed to appeal to children from Reception right up to Year 6.
Recycling assemblies are delivered as a 30 minute play and are designed to be both entertaining and informative.
Issues covered in assemblies are:
- Landfill waste and the environmental effect of landfill sites
- The environmental benefits of recycling
- What can be done with waste instead of sending it to landfill
- How to use the recycling bins provided by the council
- Bottle banks
- Charity shops
- Composting
- Taking personal responsibility for waste
We can deliver assemblies about other waste related issues too such as composting.
Sort-It Workshops
Sort-It offer a range of workshops that will enhance your school curriculum. All workshops last for a half day.
Waste detectives: Waste audit – suitable for Y5 or Y6
The waste audit is an interesting way of raising awareness in school about how much waste the school is producing and forms the basis for making a school action plan to reduce the amount of waste that the school produces. Teachers always and pupils always enjoy the practical nature of the audit and it offers pupils a real world project to get stuck into.
We leave all the lesson plans for this activity so that it can be repeated annually as part of the schools curriculum delivery and so that the audit can be used as part of a management cycle for reducing waste within the school.( Audit, action plan, implement action plan, audit…). These sessions will help you in your work on Sustainable Schools, Eco-schools and will be regarded highly by Ofsted.
Running an audit consists of three sessions:
Setting up and collecting the waste
Introducing the problem of waste and getting everything ready for collecting the waste
Weighing the waste
Spending a morning separating the waste by material, weighing and recording it. We normally then input the data into a spreadsheet, but schools could process and interpret the data if they want to.
Feedback and making a waste action plan
We feedback the results of the audit to the class/classes that participated, and then run an action planning session, normally with the school council and the head teacher, to create a school waste action plan. This can then be fed back to the whole school in an assembly which we will be happy to help deliver too.
Introduction to waste and recycling KS1 and lower KS2
The first hour of the session takes place in a hall space and explores what can happen to our waste and consists of games and activities to do with identifying materials and sorting waste out. It introduces recycling and composting.
The second hour takes place in the classroom and children rotate between creative activities such as :
Making recycled paper
Making a wallet from and old juice carton
Making a fridge magnet notice about recycling from old CD’s
Introduction to composting and/or setting up a school compost scheme (KS2)
A film introduces the main ideas about composting which is then followed by games and activities that will train your class to become expert composters. This workshop can be used to launch a school compost scheme if you don’t already have one, or can be used to revitalise an existing school composting scheme, or to help deliver the micro-organisms section of the National Curriculum.
Where stuff comes from (upper KS2)
An interactive session that explores where everyday products such as a mobile phone, a biro and a packaged sandwich really come from. We set up a mini world in the classroom and small groups research their product and report their findings back to the group. This session demonstrates how all aspects of our lives are dependent upon fossil fuels. Suggestions for follow up work can be provided, and this session can also be followed bv a closing loops session to introduce a positive response to the challenges that this session highlights.
Closing loops: eco design (upper KS2)
‘We don’t have a waste problem, we have a design problem’
In this session we use insights from natural systems to understand the roots of our waste problem. We then go on to explore a create a design for how the school can eliminate much of its waste and provide for many of its needs by recycling wastes . This is very much at the cutting edge of ecological design and is an interesting and mind opening session.
