Looking after our environment – learning how to recycle
As part of our early years curriculum, the nursery children have been learning about how to look after the environment and the world around them, with a specific focus on developing their understanding of recycling. We started our learning by talking to the children about what they already knew about recycling with lots of them sharing their knowledge of the different waste bins they had at home, with some even sharing how they helped separate their rubbish at home.
As with other areas of the curriculum and as a hook in to the topic, we first shared a couple of stories with the children, including ‘The life of a little cardboard box’ by Suzanne Fossey. The book gives children an introduction into recycling and how cardboard boxes in particular can be recycled and used many times.
Later in the term we also shared the book ‘Michael Recycle’ by Ellie Bethel, which gave the children further ideas of how they can help look after their environment. To help the children become recycling superheroes, we encouraged the children and their families to bring in their recycling from home so that the children could reuse and recycle that too. In our workshop area, the children used the skills they have been practicing all year, such as using the sellotape dispenser and cutting with the scissors, to turn the rubbish collected into something new. The children flew in to action and made a range of really creative objects such as toy rockets for their siblings and binoculars for bird watching in the garden.
