When Lewis-Arriola teacher Alison Robinson sees garbage, she sees creative opportunity and a chance to teach about the virtues of recycling.
She passed that lesson on to her fifth-grade class this fall during a hands-on recycling initiative program that included making art from stuff usually thrown away.
“It is a type of project-based learning that gets kids to be more creative and take ownership of what they are learning,” Robinson said. “They had to work as a team, be proactive and write an essay.”
Students put recycling bins in classrooms, talked to school classes about energy savings, did regular trash patrols on campus and lobbied the school maintenance staff to let classrooms control the thermostat.
But they had the most fun turning trash into art, then hosting a gallery last week showing off of their final masterpieces.
Robots were a popular theme, plus there was an all-terrain vehicle, a custom mail box, and a homemade can shooter.
Piper Baxstrom, 10, learned that “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” and that it was fun creating her robot, named Golden Oreo, out of stuff found in the trash.
“We learned it is good to recycle because it helps our environment,” she said.
Thomas Gilliland made a tin-can fortress and said that besides using trash for art, “recycling can save the planet. If we stop throwing stuff in the water, we can stop pollution.”
Audree Myers made a mail box out of trash and posted a picture of her cat Bob on the front. She said the class learned that almost everything can be recycled.
“You can make toys from trash, like a car from a coconut shell, or a soccer ball out of twine,” she said. “If we never recycled anything, our world would look like a huge dump.”
Classmate Kalli Korthank now sees trash differently, and created a comical-looking wiener dog made from paper towel rolls, an oat meal box, candy wrappers and Pop-Tart boxes.
She said recycling cardboard and paper will “save the trees in the forest because if they all get cut down, then most people would die.”
Jonathon McDonald created a Triple Squadron Airship, a type of “all-terrain vehicle that can go through water, fly or be a tank.” He enjoys repurposing trash into art.
“I’ve been doing this for a while, a lot of my ideas are inspired by Star Wars and science fiction,” he said.
Other projects included the Seattle Space Needle, TJ Comisky; flower collage, DeLace Daves; robot kind, Clayton Elliot; Killerbot, Hunter Goodall; Rotty the Robot, Easton Hartsoe; space shuttle, Tyler Jackson; alien, Ally Lowrie; digital can camera, Malea McNeley; T-rex, Preston Nielson; Billy Bob Jankins the Bull Rider, Neko Roybal; flower collage, Aalyah Robinson; Starbucks robot, Avery Stiegelmeyer; and ATAT, DJ Vreeken.
jmimiaga@the-journal.com
