Litterless Lunch and the Curriculum at Mutchmor P.S.

Rhonda Birenbaum, a teacher of grade 2/3 Gifted students at Mutchmor Public School, has introduced litterless lunches into her classroom. The school has litterless lunches once a month. However, Rhonda's class does it every day!

Rhonda has integrated this program into her Language Arts and Mathematics program. As part of the introduction to the program the students did comparison graphs of their lunches before and after litterless lunches, which they have put on display outside their classroom. The use of pie charts, bar graphs and pictographs made the analysis of garbage easy for these students to see the progress they had made. The students discussed what to do with "wet, messy" leftovers and came up with workable solutions to each problem.

Pairs of students have presented the idea of litterless lunches to other classes. The students created ideas for alternative containers and shared their list of "tips and tricks" for dealing with messy leftovers.

The students are committed to the program, excited about "making a difference", and encourage others to get involved.