Recycling Lapbook Complete!

We have a few more activities to do together in our recycling unit study, but Makayla finished her lapbook today and I wanted to share it.  We used a few different resources, but the majority of the lapbook is from Hands of a Child’s Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Project Pack.  Some of the larger colored pieces were from a recycling activity book we found for free online.  When you first open it up this is what you see: You’ll notice that the folder is a special one that had extra flap extensions already on it!  You can buy these and other wonderful lapbooking helps from Pear Educational Products.  This one has another flap to open: Makayla needed all the extra room!  If you’re interested in what is one each page you can keep reading, I’ll do closer shots and tell you a bit about what you see.  Here we have the recycling symbol, with a little information on each arrow related to how we can reduce, reuse, or recycle things.  The three flaps across the bottom are things we’ve reused in our house.  Under the flaps she tells some of the different ways we’ve reused clothes, boxes, and paper. This page has a list of reusable things in our house under the flap on the left.  The numbered piece on the right is where she recorded the five steps of the recycling process:

1. Separate trash from recyclables.
2. Recycling plants collect your materials.
3. They process them (melting metals, etc).
4. The materials are turned into new things.
5. We buy the new items.

Page three has a flap on the top left where Makayla kept a journal of things ways she reduced her trash output.  The orange pocket has eight cards inside listing reasons to recycle.  The flap at the bottom is where she told the difference between a landfill and incinerator and the drawbacks to each.  This page holds a coloring page she did about different plastics you can recycle on the bottom.  The top is an accordion that pulls out to show the 7 questions to ask yourself before buying something new.  (They are great questions!) Lifting up that flap reveals this page.  Along the left is a fact sheet about how many times different materials can be melted down or reused in new ways.  The top right has 13 vocabulary words we talked about through the unit, including steward, compost, incinerator, and decompose.  The folded up flap on the right is a graph she created about the packaging of things she found around the house.  She had to decide if they were over packaged, had reusable packaging, or if the packaging was recyclable. One last page with several pieces on it is all that is left.  The top left has the title “What am I made out of?” and underneath are pictures of things like t-shirts, pencils, and aluminum foil, and she decided what each was made from.  Under the Materials that Can Be Recycled you find information about biodegradable and industrial recyclables.  The petal book with no label has information about composting inside.  The Hazardous Waste envelope is where Makayla told what the dangers are of hazardous waste, as well as listing some items that fit this category (paint, batteries, etc).

If you’re thinking about doing a similar unit study in your family you can see the resources we’ve used in this post.