Earlier this week, the Instilling Goodness & Developing Virtue Elementary School invited us to provide some Environmental education and outreach to the kindergarten and first grade classes. We wanted to make sure our activity was appropriate for the age group, so we chose our waste sorting game.
The game appeals to students of all ages and matched with recent lessons on recycling that the students learned recently! The basis of the game is pretty simple. Each fish has a magnet inside, and each fishing rod has a string with a magnet at the end of the string. The kids would then fish for a fish, and once they caught a fish they could open a pocket on its side that had a picture of a compostable, trash or recyclable “food” the fish had eaten in the waterway. This idea was to encourage stewardship and reduce littering – so that further down the road, your trash doesn’t wind up in the bellies of fish. Once the kids figured out what the fish had eaten, they had to throw the fish into bins according to whether or not the food was compostable, recyclable or trash.
The kids had a ton of fun racing each other to properly sort their pool of fish/waste. This was a great outreach event as it allowed us to reach an entirely new cohort of youth that hadn’t played the game before. The game is also highly effective as we made sure to include some difficult items to sort like pots and pans and potato chip bags — big of which are often sorted in the wrong places.
Hopefully we can return to the Instilling Goodness & Developing Virtue Elementary School later this year with more environmental education activities. Check out a gallery of pictures from the event below.
