Track Your Trash Challenge

Our latest Classroom Energy Diet Challenge focuses on tracking our garbage and finding ways to reduce the amount of trash we create in our classroom.  We are learning about measurement right now, so measuring the amount of trash fit well with our current math goals.  Our class is good at using a balance scale for comparative measurement, but we had to learn to use a different scale to measure the amount of garbage in our classroom garbage cans.  I purchased a new bathroom scale to try, but our garbage was too light to register on the scale, so we had to do some problem solving and try different scales.  The best tool for the task turned out to be a kitchen scale and our garbage weigh in was 1044g. 

The next step was for us to decide how we could reduce the amount of trash we create.  Students had a lot of suggestions for how we could accomplish this goal:

Follow us on Twitter @MrsObachsClass for updates on our trash reduction goal!  

Day 1 went really well with our changes resulting in a BIG decrease in the amount of garbage we generated.  We only had 280 grams of trash and our recycling bin was overflowing!