Today is the second day of Lesson 1-1 in the adapted Garbage Unit. Last class, students sorted the lunch rubbish and created categories. The categories this class created were food, paper, plastic, and cardboard. They observed the patterns of properties of materials in the rubbish. Today students made predictions about how those materials will change over time. We shared our predictions with each other.

To check some of our predictions and see where our trash goes, we took a virtual field trip. The ‘ōpala system is different than the garbage system in other places, so we adapted the unit by including videos that are locally relevant. For example, after sorting at homes or businesses, rubbish goes to the H-Power waste-to-energy plant rather than to a landfill. We gave students sticky notes to write down the questions they have. We told students that we would be using these questions to plan our investigations.

First, we showed a video clip from a science show for kids about waste-to-energy plants. (We started this video at 0:22 and ended at 1:57 to focus on content appropriate for elementary students.) We told the students that even though this video was made in Massachusetts, we have the same kind of waste-to-energy plant in Hawai‘i in Kapolei.

Next we showed the video clip that comes with The Garbage Unit about landfills (This video clip is 2 min 19 sec.) On O‘ahu, the ash from the burned rubbish goes to a landfill rather than trash going directly to the landfill. We do not explain this to the students yet, that will come in the next lesson when we create the system model.

We showed a third video clip from the local news about H-Power, which is the trash-to-energy plant in Kapolei. This clip features students explaining what H-Power is and how it benefits O‘ahu. We started the clip at 0:25 and ended at 2:32.

For homework, students were asked to notice things that go in the rubbish at home, draw and label these things, and place them in the appropriate category (food, plastic, paper, cardboard). For each category, students were asked to list some properties of things in that category. Lastly, students were asked to talk to their families about how they get rid of their rubbish. We will use this information to build a model of the ‘Ōpala system next class.