Last week, after students tracked and sorted their trash for a whole week, it was time for a field trip! An article in the Green Times about Fairfax, a recycling company, caught Jennifer’s eye, so they took their recyclables to its recycling center / landfill and had a tour with Jason Tankersley, the CEO.
Then it was time for the real fun — quantifying and graphing what they learned. You can see their graphs in the front hall. There are giant bar graphs showing what each person used. Some of the bars are so long they snake across the ceiling, the opposite wall, and the floor, back to the graph. (The bar for Patrick’s total is especially long, but so is the bar for his compostable garbage.) Liam, Patrick, Diego, and Kaelan did the math and made a pie chart to show the percentage of kinds of trash used, and Emerson made bar graphs to show the change in trash collected from day to day.
It would be a math problem in itself to figure our how many different things students learned in the course of this cool project!
