Teaching your children all about recycling
Recycling is a very important part of life, as it keeps the environment cleaner and ensures that there is less landfill space. Essentially, the act of recycling involves separating certain materials and reusing them for making new materials later on. This conserves resources and energy.
Teaching your children the importance of recycling makes sense. That way, they will learn early in life how to be more environmentally-conscious and green oriented. If you are unsure of how they can grasp such a complicated concept, you should follow some tips:
Talk about what they think a particular item is made of
What materials go into making the everyday items we use is at the core of recycling. Essentially, you can recycle, paper, glass, plastic and more. When it comes to teaching this to your children, you can start off easy and simple. Talk with them about what certain items are made. For example, the next time you have to throw a cereal box, ask them what they think it is made of and in what bin it should go in. Then, let them drop it in the correct place, which gives them an easy lesson and an excellent way for them to become more knowledgeable.
Place recycle bins around your home
When you are first starting off your recycling quest with your children, you want to ensure there are enough bins around your home. Start off with the basics – plastic, paper and glass. That ought to be simple enough even for toddlers to understand. At this point, you don’t want to make the list too complicated. A ‘bin’ doesn’t necessarily need to be a bin, but a simple box or a bag that can hold the items.
Are there any creative ways to utilise recycled material?
There are many crafty projects that you can go with when it comes to using recycled materials with your children. For instance, if you have a pet hamster, you can make a toilet paper roll fort for them to run and hide into. Egg cartons make good paint holders, or you can use them as pockets for small bits and items, like paper clips, for example. With some cutting and slicing, you can turn a milk jug or carton into a birdseed feeder and watch as the birds flock around your garden.
Collect food scraps
If you have a garden, you should use food scraps, such as orange, banana and cucumber peels as compost. Teach your children that such food scraps can easily go into a container outside, where you can later use the material like compost. This is a wonderful opportunity to teach them some things about the garden as well.
There are things you cannot recycle
As you teach your children what they can recycle, it is equally important to introduce them to items that you cannot recycle. While this is a more advanced concept, it is important to lay down these basic concepts, since putting items not meant for recycling in the bin can contaminate the others and render them unrecyclable.
Take your children to a recycling centre
Many recycling centres welcome school groups as part of their attempts to educate the youth about recycling. If possible, make sure to make such a visit with your children, because there is much to learn. They will see what recycling is all about first hand and get a better concept of why it is important to recycle.
Following these tips is a sure way to teach your children about such an important concept as recycling.
