Plastic Free July

Plastic Free July

For Plastic Free July we thought about ways we could stop using plastic at school. We decided to look at our lunches and for maths we took out our lunchboxes, tallied up how we packaged our food and made some graphs to show how much plastic we currently used. 

We realized we used a lot more plastic than we thought so we decided to use small containers instead of glad wrap and with the shop brought items we took them out of their packets.
 On  July 1 we took our lunch boxes out of our bags and looked at our packaging. Once we had seen our lunch boxes on the ground we worked out that there were still a few people using plastic in their lunch boxes but otherwise the majority of lunch boxes were really good.

We carried on tallying them up.
A few days later after we had completed our bar graphs and saw a huge difference in the columns because there was no plastic wrappers in our lunchboxes. It was really cool to see the changes that we had made.
We have since had a discussion about how we can make our own packaging like bees wax wraps.

Plastic Free July

         Beeswax wraps                                                                  

 To encourage and support our whānau in the Moana room (infant and toddlers area) we (kaiako and tamariki) made beeswax wraps to hand out to our whānau. We made these for our whānau with the hope they would use as an alternative to glad wrap. First we had to grate the wax into pellets, then we melted the wax and added our cotton material. When we had fully coated our material we then hung our wraps to dry:)
Beau is enjoying the hands-on experience and he is being very careful when using the grater. Tino pai Beau!

We have done this process with different groups of tamariki throughout the week so everyone got to experience and participate in learning of ways to reduce our plastic use, however small that may be.