Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

Tune In:

Organising Your Clean Up Day

Find Out:

Sorting it out!

Take Action:

Analysing the results

Reflection

Learning Intentions and Success Criteria

Students will:

explore how community involvement helps protect the environment by planning and participating in a Schools Clean Up day as well as reflecting on how waste affects nature nearby and suggesting ways to manage waste better in their local community.

Students can:

describe the impacts of litter on waste in the environment and local communities
plan and participate in their own Schools Clean Up event.
evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts by analysing the types and quantities of trash collected and proposing recommendations for reducing waste in the future.

Tune In: Organising your Clean Up Day

Step 1

Explain to your students that there is an organisation called Clean Up Australia that encourages people to work together to make our environment better by stopping litter and waste. This organisation holds an event called the Clean Up Day, where lots of people come together to clean up their community.

You might like to watch this video with your students from the start until 1:17 minutes to give them more of an idea of what the Clean Up Day is!

Clean Up Australia Day, 2021 - Behind the News (youtube.com/watch?v=W8B3ErkVT1k)

Creating a Clean Up Event is a great way to make a difference in our environment on any day of the year. You might like to ask your students to brainstorm how your local community or school could benefit from a Clean Up Day.

Step 2

Explain to your students that they are going to work together as a class to plan all the elements of a Clean Up Day for their local community. Students will learn project planning skills and how to work together to organise a big event with teacher support.

Rather than getting your students to plan Schools Clean Up Day, you may want to run it yourself. Here are some instructions to help you prepare and direct students and staff on the day.

Two weeks before the event, allocate your students into 7 groups and get them to work through the tasks shown on the Plan a Clean Up Day For Your Community factsheet. You can project or distribute these group descriptions to get them prepared for their Clean Up Day. Each group is to complete the Student Worksheet, which consists of a project plan template they can follow. Students will need to liaise with the other groups to communicate the information they have planned.

Try not to give your students too many directions. The planning process is designed to be student-driven, resulting in an exercise in communication, leadership and organisation.

Find Out: Sorting it out

Step 1

All the rubbish that you collect can be sorted, tallied and reported back to Clean Up Australia. The collection of this information enables important statistical data to be collected from Clean Up activities all over Australia. This data is valuable for identifying trends in the types and spread of rubbish throughout Australia.

Count the types of trash collected with your students using the planning group 7 put together.

To assist with group 7: You can access the Clean Up Report from the Clean Australia website here to see what categories students should be on the lookout for. These include hard plastics, mixed plastics, soft plastics, polystyrene, electrical waste, glass, metal, paper/cardboard, rubber, fabrics, and wood. Please note that only one bag in every five needs to be counted.

You can share the results at an assembly and do the Clean Up Australia Rubbish Survey when you are finished!

Step 2

Ensuring you dispose of this rubbish the right way is an important component of the Clean Up. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to work out where to dispose of what types of rubbish. Encourage your students, with the aid of Group 5, to look out for the Australasian Recycling Label on any packaging they find and use the Recycle Mate website to help them figure out what the correct method of disposal is for the rubbish they’ve collected.

Take Action: Analysing the results

Step 1

As a class, go through all the data surveys to analyse the data collected at the site. Have students add up the data surveys and total up the results focusing on the types of rubbish that were found and the numbers of those types of rubbish.

Choose a way of presenting the class results i.e. pie charts, line or bar graphs and put together posters to display the results around the classroom.

Step 2

Share the 2023 Litter Report from Clean Up Australia with your students. In their groups from the planning, encourage students to read the report and compare the results of the 2023 survey with their Clean Up Day results. Students could answer the questions below on their student worksheets.

What was the most frequently found litter in both clean ups? Why do you think this was the same or different?
What were the differences between the two data sets? Why do you think this is?
Look at the litter distribution by site type graph on page 8. What are the four places that had the biggest percentage of litter found?
What does this tell you about litter and where it ends up? Why do you think this is an issue?

The top 4 sites with the highest percentage of litter were coastal/beaches, parks, public bushland and river/creeks. Litter has a strong likelihood of ending up in our waterways. All environments support ecosystems as well as human activities.
What else did you find interesting from this report and your own experience?

Step 3

You might like to conduct a class discussion that touches on the following questions:

Where did the rubbish come from?
Are there any activities that have created a lot of rubbish?
Has technology played a role in generating waste?
What are the possible impacts of rubbish on our school and our health?
How much rubbish that we collected could be reduced, reused or recycled?
How can the data we collect be used to reduce the amount of rubbish?
How did it make you feel to see the amount of rubbish before the collection?
How does it make you feel to see the site clean after the collection?
How can we prevent the same amount of rubbish in the future?

Step 4

These discussions may lead students to think more critically about where the rubbish they have collected has come from, where it ends up, how it impacts us and the environment, and how rubbish could be reduced by disposing of it correctly or reducing what we use. Take this opportunity to take these ideas further with your class with the following optional tasks.

Educate others

Assign groups to a specific type of trash that was found frequently during your clean up (e.g., plastic bottles, food wrappers, paper).

Each group could create a presentation showing the environmental impact of their type of trash. They should include information on how long it takes to decompose, how it affects the environment and wildlife, and ways to reduce or recycle it.
Groups can present their research to the class and discuss strategies for reducing the use of, reusing and recycling these items.

Make a Pledge

Join the community of people making pledges to improve the environment. Explore the individual pledges shown on Clean Up Australia's website and encourage students to write their pledges on a poster. You could display these in the classroom or get the whole school involved and display them in an area everyone frequents!

Spark a behaviour change

If there was a certain type of rubbish frequently found or a specific activity that takes place in your class or school that contributed to a lot of the trash found, your students could plan a behaviour change campaign to try to change the way people think of rubbish in their school.

Reflection

Invite students to work independently to reflect on their involvement in the Clean Up event and answer the following questions (depending on age and ability this could be through discussion or writing):

Has involvement in this activity changed the way you value the environment?
Will you make changes to your behaviour?

Send the End of Clean Up Report incorporating the Rubbish Survey to Clean Up Australia so it can be used in the annual Rubbish Report. You may want to organise a BBQ and invite parents along to celebrate Clean Up Australia Day.

Clean Up Australia - Getting Involved with Your Community

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Lesson Guides and Printables

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Clean Up Australia - Getting Involved with Your Community

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Summary

Lesson Guides and Printables

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