Recycling – making
The purpose of this resource is to provide suggestions to whānau about how they can facilitate maths conversations about spatial thinking by recycling.
About this resource
This section provides some ideas for how you can raise awareness and share mathematics using everyday experiences and resources found around your home. It includes ideas for supporting your children’s learning in all areas of mathematics: geometry, measurement, statistics, algebra, and number.
This page provides suggestions as to how mathematics conversations about spatial thinking can be facilitated by recycling.
Making
If you enjoy making things with your children, the recycling bin can provide cheap materials to create art projects and sculptures. During the making sessions, support your child’s spatial thinking by asking questions and making comments.
- Do you think that will fit there? How will we get all the edges to match up? I can see you rotated that piece and glued it upside down to make a hat!
Below are some recycling bin projects.
Cardboard box city: Paint boxes or make inside-out boxes (see Keeping) and create a city for your toy cars. Beware, these projects use up lots of cello tape!
Junk-bots: Use bits and bobs to make 3-D or 2-D robots. You can use hot glue to create robots that can stand up on tin can legs (3-D) or glue bits like old CDs to heavy cards or paper to make robot portraits (2-D).
Glass jar gardens: Use clean glass jars to make small terrariums. Fill the jar 1/3 full of damp sandy soil. Find small seedlings at the edge of the park or creek and plant them in the soil. Poke some holes in the lid and put it on the window sill. Encourage your child to try different kinds of plants in different-shaped jars to find out which work best.
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