Answer the following questions on your own in your technology notebook.
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Do you recognize any patterns in the items you throw away in a day? For example, do you see a lot of a particular kind of material? Do you see a lot of trash related to some activity you do?
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How much garbage do you think you throw away in a day? Provide a guess in pounds.
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What are some things you think you and your family or school could do to throw less away?
Answers to Reflect and Connect
Have your students work individually to answer the following questions. Once they have completed their answers, you may wish to have students discuss them in teams or as a class.
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Do you recognize any patterns in the items you throw away in a day? For example, do you see a lot of a particular kind of material? Do you see a lot of trash related to some activity that people do?
Students may have difficulty understanding this question at first. You may want to help them by asking if the items are mostly related to food or if they are mostly paper or mostly plastic. This should help students start thinking about the patterns they might see. They may list as many different patterns as they can think of. This question is a good one to discuss with the whole class to see if students notice any trends among the whole class.
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How much garbage do you think you throw away in a day? Provide a guess in pounds.
Students will likely not feel as though they can answer this question very well. It is foreshadowing for the next activity in which they look at the amount of trash the average American throws away. You may want to help them make an estimate by asking them to think about the number of items they have and then weighing something that they agree is an “average”-sized piece of trash. If your classroom trash can has a bag in it, another option is to remove the bag and weigh it to give students a reference. The purpose of this question is to have students think about the amount of trash that they are producing, and it is not important that they have a correct answer.
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What are some things you think you and your family or school could do to throw away less.
Encourage students to be as specific as possible. Many students will give general answers such as “Recycle more.” Have them try to list specific things that they currently throw away but which could be recycled. You might also have them think about what they do before something is thrown away. For example, they might be able to use reusable grocery bags or keep scrap paper for small notes.