The first week of March is Twinkl Green Week! It’s a new initiative from Twinkl to help educators and children to consider environmental issues and how they can promote eco-friendly actions. Twinkl Green Week 2018 runs from March 5th to March 11th. Let’s look at some of the exciting cross-curricular resources available to tie-in with this theme, for KS1 and KS2 students.
Subtraction Mosaic and Twinkl Green Week Fortune Teller printed in super-eco format!
Twinkl Green Week with Morris Magpie
The Messy Magpie is one of the latest Twinkl Originals storybooks. It’s available in eBook and PDF format, so you can read it on your computer. Morris the Magpie collects a treasure trove of litter discarded by humans. But, he soon learns that all that glitters is not gold. Morris and his animal friends discover a recycling facility. They work together to transport all the rubbish to be recycled and reused. This story is a great way to illustrate the damage that carelessly abandoned litter can harm our environment. Perfectly geared toward KS1 students but equally appealing to slightly older and younger readers because of the beautiful illustrations and thoughtful message.
Opting for eBooks is a good way to reduce your paper consumption and declutter your learning space. While nothing beats the experience of holding a printed book in your hands, it cannot be denied that the sheer volume of books younger students go through adds up to a veritable unwieldy library. Have you considered reading scheme rentals, a select amount of good quality reference books and just a few beautifully illustrated class readers for display purposes? Everything else can be accessed as eBooks with a minimal footprint – any existing computer or eReader will serve. In fact, I used Reading Chest rental books for several years with my own children to avoid stockpiling endless quantities of early phonics readers.
Super-Eco for Twinkl Green Week
Act like a messy magpie and learn which symbols indicate recyclable materials with a Recycling Materials Detective activity sheet. Gather some clean empty containers and other packaging materials. Furnish your students with magnifying glasses (for true detective vibes). See if you can work out what is and is not recyclable in your area!
For added green kudos, this activity sheet is one of the many Twinkl resources now available in the super-eco format. When viewed on your computer, you will notice that the worksheet looks slightly grainy. However, when you print it out, the grainy effect is virtually unnoticeable, compared to the standard version worksheet. (Particularly if you use an inkjet rather than a laser printer.) The way it works is that the tiny dots that make up a digital image are interspersed with more whitespace than usual. It allows your printer to use less ink to print the image while retaining almost the same quality as the standard version. Or, in more technical terms, the super-eco version has fewer DPI (dots per inch) than the standard version. It’s also faster to print and a great cost-saving, which is a fab side-effect!
Choose to print in super-eco format to save on ink and printing costs!
In fact, there are many Messy Magpie worksheets available in the super-eco format. If you need to differentiate for your students, the Time Challenge worksheets is a good example. Telling time and calculating time sums is one of those math problems that can prove tricky even for older students. Whether you’re homeschooling mixed age siblings, juggling a composite class, or looking for shooting/zooming or chilli challenge workstations, differentiated worksheets are fantastic. It allows mixed ability students to work on the same topic while still adjusting for individual ability. I love the juxtaposition of inclusiveness and tailored levels.
Recycling for Twinkl Green Week
The 3 Rs of eco-friendliness are: reduce, reuse and recycle. Twinkl Green Week is a great time to explain these habits to your little learners – and a timely reminder for the adults too!
- Learn about recycling with differentiated reading comprehension worksheets.
- Create a mixed media poster to promote recycling, using leftover craft supplies and pictures from old magazines. (Don’t forget to recycle the leftover paper!) Show this persuasive writing PowerPoint presentation to get your children thinking about poster ideas.
- If your kids aren’t into artwork, try applying persuasive writing skills to letter writing instead.
- Help sort the recyclable materials this week and pledge to continue or increase your recycling for the rest of the year.
- If you don’t already have a scrap paper drawer, set one up. All papers that have one blank unused side (such as old single-side worksheets or unwanted junk mail) go in the drawer. Kids can reuse this scrap paper for drawing and doodling eg during wet weather indoor play or for scrap paper workings during maths. Worksheets that don’t need to be saved for evidential purposes, such as our favourite word searches, can go straight to the scrap paper drawer for reuse.
- Talk about reducing the materials you use on an everyday basis and brainstorm ideas for waste reduction. For example, only printing if you really need a hard copy or switching off lights if no one is using a room. See how many ideas your students can come up with! If you have a large number of children taking part, split them into teams for small group work.
Twinkl Green Week 2018 Goals
For Twinkl Green Week 2018, I am seriously thinking about how to reduce my material consumption and declutter my workspace. I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to “just in case” printouts. Stockpiling potential junk modelling materials is also a hoarding sin. Personally, I’m going to use this week to do a major tidy up. I shall pledge to use up existing materials before buying anything new! However, it is first and foremostly a great opportunity to promote good eco-friendly habits to my kids.
What would you like to achieve, this Green Week? Do you have any tips for waste reduction or reusing materials? Whatever your eco-goals are, I wish you a very successful and creative Twinkl Green Week 2018!
March 13, 2018 at 6:42 pm
Hi Sloah, making children aware of what environmental damage we are causing by haphazardly disposing of waste, when we could be recycling it is excellent, after all they are the future. I love the fact that the worksheets are ink saving printables… There is a huge problem with rubbish disposal on Zakynthos, so much so that for six months last winter and again at the start of this winter there was very little rubbish collection going on as there was no wether to take the rubbish (it wasn’t nice). There is now a proper rubbish disposal place for non recyclable rubbish, Yay! We really started to try to reduce our waste a couple of years back when we realised what a problem there was and applied for our own recycle bin which gets picked up weekly. Recycling and attempting to reduce rubbish are habits we should all be trying to form.
xx