History meets Recycling

I am loving our new focus on history. The kids love history and it is constantly on our agenda, I have started to get them to look at history in a different way or more how it is connected to how we live today and how people will live in the future.

We had a great discussion whilst in the bath, about how we know about history and how many things we have looked at are the same in history but have changed, for example our theme for the past few years has been focusing on how people live, so we looked at how fashions have changed, ho toys have changed and how people's houses have changed and in addition what, in those houses have changed like lighting for instance from candles to bulbs.

We went back to some of the things we have seen and learnt about such as the nomads caves we went to look at and the Castles we have been too along with the museums we have attended. 

We talked about the theme of things changing and  I asked what was the common theme throughout the changes, and asked them to think about why those changes occurred.

We came up with the answer that things changed so that people's lives were made better, better housing, better ways to cook and our favourite example was how shampoo is bottled, instead of people walking from the shops with shampoo dripping through their fingers someone came up with a way to bottle shampoo to carry it away easily making it easy to transport shampoo.

We then discussed how these good changes can cause problems or discourse, for example although people have come up with ways to package things and make it easy for us with canned and packaged foods instead of having to go to a field for our food to harvest it ourselves, this in itself causes issues such as disposal of all that packaging.

I got them to think about it by using the example of the shampoo bottle and telling them that there are 45 million people in our country so imagine 45 million people each having one shampoo bottle, were does that go?. how big that mound of empty shampoo bottles would be, so people have had to come up with ways to recycle things. Then I asked them to think about each person in the world having one shampoo bottle each and how big that mound of shampoo bottles would be.

We looked at the bottom of the shampoo bottle and talked about the recycling sign on the bottom of the bottle.

We talked about mummies business and how it is based on recycling, by mummy selling items that people no longer need, they avoid going to landfill and lengthening their life by selling them to people that wanted to use them therefore helping to keep the environment slightly better off.

So we now have two trips planned from this conversation, one to a recycling centre, although they are aware of recycling centres anyway as we go to the local tip, a visit to a working demonstrable recycling centre will be excellent and  I do know of a couple of places that do educational visits which centre on non-recyclable waste that I can arrange a visit for.

When we were talking about fashion changing we realised that we have never attended a fashion museum, showing changes in fashion throughout the centuries, so that will be our second visit to plan, a fashion museum.

I set them a project to do in their own time over the coming months, I challenged them to come up with something made entirely out of recycled materials, this can be anything that is usable or decorative.

But the rules are they have to plan it first with diagrams and lists of materials needed. Using their own imagination or searching You Tube for websites for ideas.