Estimate Time Teaching Will Last: One hour.
Location of Teaching: Elementary School Classroom.
Supplies, Materials, Equipment Needed: Litter bins signed “Metal”, “Paper”, “Plastic”, a pile of empty plastic bottles, juice containers, food wrappers, cans, batteries, newspapers, pictures of littered locations.
Target: Elementary school students.
Topic: “Help our planet become more beautiful”. Litter is a serious environmental issue in the world nowadays and raising social awareness of this subject is necessary to help prevent the pollution of the environment we live in. Littering is a bad habit and it can be stopped (What is Littering? n. d.).
Statistics Related to Topic: Every year millions of tons of trash are being discharged into the environment. The total amount of trash generated every year in the United States is two hundred fifty million tons. At least eighteen percent of all the litter in the United States ends up in water streams and oceans (Litter Trashes the Environment, 2014). The most common types of litter are paper (twenty-nine percent), plastic (two percent), glass (six percent), metal (twenty-eight percent), and fast food waste (thirty-three percent) (Littering Statistics, 2013).
Nursing Diagnosis: This environmental issue is able to cause multiple dangers if it is not prevented in time and if it is out of control. Litter pollution can cause soil contamination and air pollution. Soil contamination is the source of various contagious diseases and poisonings, and air pollution causes respiratory illnesses and pathologies. Besides, big litter sites have a tendency to become the areas where mosquitoes breed, the increasing population of mosquitoes living in the polluted environment can cause the occurrence of diseases like Malaria. Moreover, dangerous waste, such as explosives or sharp litter, is able to become the reason of accidents where human life and health can be endangered.
Readiness for Learning: The factors that indicate the children’s readiness are the amount of packed food they consume and their everyday experience with potential litter.
Learning Theory to Be Utilized: The children will be informed about the dangers litter creates and the negative impacts of environmental pollution on people’s health with the help of photos of polluted locations, malaria mosquitoes, trash-filled water streams and beaches.
Behavioral Objectives and Domain: The students first will be asked to identify the types of trash shown to them.
Content: Plastic litter includes objects like bottles, plastic bags, plastic wrappers and boxes. Paper litter is newspapers, magazines, paper wrappers, and cartons. Metal waste is batteries, cans, food containers.
Strategy: The class will be divided into teams and each team will be given the bins labeled according to the types of litter. In a form of a contest, the teams will be given piles of trash objects and asked to put them into the correct bins.
Creativity: The game was created for the children to learn to differentiate between the types of litter and train the students to throw the trash into the correct bins.
Evaluation of Objectives: Checking if the children used the bins correctly for all the types of trash. Asking questions about what kinds of dangers littering creates.
Planned Evaluation of Goal: Will only be available after a while through asking the staff of the school if the littering on the school’s territory was reduced after the class.
Communication: The lesson will be started with a question “Do you like the home you live in?” and end with the phrase “Remember, every time you pick up your litter and throw it into the bin – you help our planet become more beautiful and healthy”.
Reference List
Littering Statistics. (2013). Statistic Brain. Web.
Litter Trashes the Environment. (2014). About. Web.
What Is Littering? (n. d.). IGSU. Web.