Tag Archives: PS1-1

A Virtual Tour of the ‘Ōpala System

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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.

Rubbish Sort

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Tuesday was the first day of the ‘Ōpala unit. ‘Ōpala is the Hawaiian word for garbage and the unit is adapted from the NYU SAIL Garbage Unit, which is an Open Educational Resource. The Garbage Unit was awarded the NGSS Design Badge.

Locally, we use the word rubbish rather than the word garbage. The unit is place-based as we are studying our local ‘ōpala system. The unit is problem-based as students will be figuring out what happens to their rubbish and why it happens. In this phase of the unit, students have opportunities to experience the anchoring phenomenon. We engage students with the phenomenon of rubbish and we elicit their initial ideas. Students will later create a driving question board. During the unit the class will answer their questions through investigations.

Tuesday was the first day of our unit. Lesson 1-1 takes 4 days. The first activity was for students to sort items from the lunch rubbish into categories. I asked each group of students to observe a small pile of rubbish. I asked them how and why scientists make observations. They knew that scientists looked at things carefully to figure out how and why things happen. The students were tasked with sorting their rubbish pile into smaller categories.

Rubbish sorted into food and not food categories

Two kinds of sorting emerged. A few groups of students sorted their rubbish into two categories—food and non food. The rest of the groups sorted their rubbish into three categories—paper, plastic, and cardboard.

We talked about how scientists use patterns of properties to identify materials. The students wrote down the sorting categories and the properties of things in those categories in their science notebooks.

Tomorrow we will predict what happens to those categories of things over time in the rubbish and take a virtual tour of the ‘Ōpala system.