The City of Fort St John recently tweeted out garbage and recycling stats. This is a great real world learning object for a wide variety of grades / curricular areas.
Roughly 65 elephants worth of garbage NOT going to the land fill. Yay #yxj!! pic.twitter.com/jnWgboIfLp
— City of Fort St John (@fortstjohn) March 4, 2016
It would be very interesting at the end of the year to see all the stats for all months.
Asking students, “what do you wonder?” about the chart could generate all kinds of interesting topics to study and further questions to ask. Some of my initial thoughts below
- Why is December much higher on garbage but lower on recycling?
- How much money does recycling save/cost the city?
- What can we recycle?
- Why should we recycle?
- What are other options to recycling?
- How much is a metric tonne?
- How much does an average elephant weigh?
- predict based on the four available months what the yearly total may be
- Using the data build different types of graphs for garbage and recycling
What do your students wonder? Comment below and share!