5th graders at Cherokee Elementary learned about food systems by helping our growing corn through all the steps it takes to get to us, and finding out what happens to the corn after we’re done with it!“Ralph the Worm” and his friends helping 5th graders learn what we can and can’t put in the compost!After we found out what foods we could compost, we had to learn how to identify them on our lunch trays. Here students participate in a trial run to identify what food groups our foods belong to. So much fun, and a great opportunity to talk about all the foods that make a healthy diet!For 4 days 5th graders separated all the waste they generated at lunch into appropriate categories, and then weighed them to see how much of what we throw away could be composted, recycled, or saved! In 4 days 5th grade made almost 130lbs of waste!After all their hard work, here are the results from 5th grade’s compost pilot. Using the numbers they generated from the expiriment we made a big poster to hang in the cafeteria, and show to everyone the huge impact composting made. They reduced their total lunch waste by 64%!We hung several posters about compost made by 5th grade in the cafeteria, to share with everyone the wonders of turning our waste to beautiful soil! Here we see Ralph the Worm continues to educate!
