Event. Plastics: Today and Tomorrow

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Dates: from April 5th to April 23rd  

Teacher: Laura Fernandez Alonso 

Description and resources

I started to create this learning scenario the last academic year and during this current period I have continued working on it, including new resources and activities to enrich the unit. Also the fact to work with a different group of students make it more interesting.

The topic is plastics, focused to real life. Students discovered the types of plastic, the real information that appear printed, the Pacific Garbege Patch, the lifecycle of a plastic bottle, the textiles and the relationship between textiles and plastics, the bioplastics and how to make bioplastic at home, the discovered how long an object takes to dissapear by creating a waste timeline or they knew how PET is made by doing a puzzle.

Different resources were used. All material created (we work with worksheets, I prepare them for the students to work) are upload to a onenote site. Some of resources used were: Microsoft One Note, flipgrid, Genially, Microsoft Teams, Mentimeter…

One note screenshot where worksheets are available for students. This is one of the activities inspired by scientix resources.

We also did a workshop but due to current COVID19 situation they did at home. They look for different plastics, classified them and experiment about the density. They record a video using flipgrid.

Density test. This is a screenshot from flipgrid where students uploaded their videos.

Finally they made bioplastic at home and the experiment was share with classmates at home.

This is a screenshot from teams, where students uploaded the bioplastic experiment.

The learning scenario is based on worksheets created by the teacher. All the material used can be found here.

At the end of the unit students gave me the feedback using mentimeter and doing a small survay.

To create the material I was inspired by several resources, such as this one included in the Scientix Repository http://www.scientix.eu/resources/details?resourceId=6810. Some worskheets were inspired in BLOOM SCHOOL BOX RESOURCES Growing plastic and new life for plastic.

On the other hand, a student in last grade develop a project based on bioplastics. And she made bioplastic at home but using other materials (agar agar). All research can be found here. 

I encourage other teachers to visit this site and have a look to the resources there to use them in their lessons. It is a present-day topic and, from my experience, students learn and have fun at the same time.