For Harvest Festival this year we have been working on the theme 'Feed the World, Save the World'. The whole school has been thinking about our wonderful planet and some of the problems we are facing as a global community at the moment. In Year One, we have focused on the problem of plastic in the ocean as a link to our Pirates topic and to our Creation topic in RE.  We began by talking about pollution generally and the impact it can have on our planet. We looked at lots of different food packaging and the materials they were made from. We talked about the properties of the materials and why we might use particular materials for different purposes. We also discussed alternatives ie using glass bottles instead of plastic bottles.  We also talked about whether all foods needed packaging. Do bananas need to be inside a plastic bag? We discovered that although some children thought crisp packets were made from foil they are actually made from plastic which takes over 200 years to break down.

After this we thought about ways we could help our planet. We said that there were some products which did need plastic packaging to prevent food waste by keeping in fresh. We also decided we could choose to buy some products which did not have plastic packaging. We also said we could help by taking our water bottles out with us so we don't buy bottles of pop which we then throw away. We could stop using plastic drinking straws.

Another way we can help to reduce the amount of plastic we throw away is to reuse things wherever we can so there is less waste. We could reuse plastic bottles, trays and yoghurt pots. We can save plastic bags and use them lots of times! 

The last way we thought of was that we could recycle as much as possible. Many plastic items are recyclable. We can wash them out and put them in our recycling bins. 

Reduce - Reuse- Recycle!

We had some plastic waste after our session looking at the properties of materials so we decided to REUSE them to make a picture making people aware of plastic pollution.

We worked in teams to create a pirate ship picture reusing plastic waste. We used paint brushes to create the sea and sponge printed the sky before adding details.  

We found out that you can put your empty Walkers crisp packets in an envelope and return them to Walkers free of charge to encourage them to do something about the huge plastic problem we are facing at the moment. The hope is that this will help them to address the problem more quickly! The address is:

Consumer Services Department
Walkers Snack Foods
FREEPOST LE4 918
Leicester
LE4 5ZY