You can't throw a plastic bag in the recycle your house. But look, we can make a jump rope out of it, we can make fabric out of it. You can't recycle clothing, but we can upcycle that T shirt into a bag that you can use and guess what not use plastic shopping bags.
In our modern disposable society? How do we teach kids to be mindful of the impact that everyday objects might have on our environment. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College. I'm your host, Steve fast. Today we're talking about conscious crafting a fun and engaging series of activities that can help teach kids not only how to get creative, but also educate a little on the reusability of materials that can easily just take up space in a landfill.
I'm Libby Tormach. I'm the senior flight director at the Challenger Learning Center at Heartland Community College.
So let me welcome to the podcast again. Often we talk about space because of the Challenger Learning Center. And I know that one of the things you do at the Challenger Learning Center is like to have hands on experiments and crafts and things that kids can do to learn a little bit about the natural world and the extra terrestrial world. But this is something that goes a little bit farther. Let's talk about conscious crafting. What do you mean by that conscious crafting?
Just crafting so it goes farther by bringing it closer. Conscious crafting is a camp that's all about creating things out of old materials and being really conscious of our impact on our planet Earth.
So one of the things that people call that is upcycling, is it the same as upcycling?
Yeah, actually, I was just doing some reading about that earlier, upcycling and recycling are not always the same thing. But yes, that's what we're gonna be doing some recycling, some reusing some upcycling, exactly.
Talk a little bit about this, what are some of the projects that you have for kids? To get them to be aware, first of all of the materials that they're using? And second of all, to think about things in a more reusable or conscious way?
Great question. So I'm actually really excited. And I'm sure we'll touch on this in a bit. But we have a partnership with the ecology Action Center locally. And so Jen from the EAC is going to actually start us off by talking about recycling things that can and can't be recycled, she's going to really dive in with the kids prior knowledge to build on that. And then we're going to be able to springboard from that list of what can and can't be recycled into, Hey, did you know you can't throw a plastic bag in the recycle at your house. But look, we can make a jump rope out of it, we can make fabric out of it. Hey, did you know you can't recycle clothing, but we can upcycle that T shirt into a bag that you can use and guess what not use plastic shopping bags. And so there's gonna be kind of a lot of interplay. We're engineering birdfeeders out of old materials. And we may even be making like stamps out of bottle caps and things like that, just reusing materials that would get thrown away or mistakenly dumped into recycle and then wrote a whole load of recycling at the facility. Yeah, that's
something about recycling, I think many people think just if something is plastic can be recycled. Or if it's got a certain recycling mark on it, it can be recycled, but not all of those recycling marks are actually recyclable locally, or even most places, right?
Yeah, and definitely the things that you may be able to recycle. You know, like here at Heartland, they have single stream and you can throw certain things in. But at your house, you couldn't necessarily throw those same things in, I know, used to be able to take plastic bags to certain stores in town, and they had equipment that could recycle it. But if you throw a plastic bag into your home recycle, and that went through the system, it could jam the machines at the recycling facility, you know, and so definitely, and you know, we used to take milk jugs with milk still in them or ranch bottles and just throw them in, you're supposed actually to clean that stuff out, you know, and they're kind of all these different rules of care to help make it actually work that I think a lot of people just don't think about, or they kind of take for granted.
Yeah, that's something that the easier you make it to recycle, the more people will do it. But then they stopped paying attention to any of the rules that you might have in any case. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about what your overall goal is to kind of teach kids about these things and how they tie into the natural world. Do you have any specific examples? It's kind of interesting that you're using empty soda bottle to make a bird feeder. When you think about birds are often some of the creatures that are really affected by problems with things that are unrecyclable
Yeah, and that's one of the things that I hope kids can see is that a single object right can be very harmful or very useful. And it's all about well, consciousness, right, how aware you are and how purposeful you are, about taking the steps you need to safely use it. You could be totally thought Listen, throw a plastic bag away or you could just throw away a t shirt when it doesn't fit anymore, or you could be very purposeful about it. And I want kids to See that just about anything they hold in their hands can either be safely disposed up or reused. And that's good for our environment, you know, less cutting down of resources. If we're using the same materials, less production and labor, I was reading about upcycling and fashion earlier, and the chemical treatments and the things that go into making a fabric that aren't being used if you're just reusing the same fabrics, and things like that are really quite fascinating. And so it's kind of ultimately all about helping kids just really be more aware of it. Because this is a summer camp, we're here to have fun and make cool projects. But that can still be a vessel to contain an important message of awareness to
Well, that's something as well, not only are you maybe teaching kids a little bit about the materials and where they come from, and how they enter into the ecosystem, but also, just that kind of creativity, that's one of the things I know that you're very involved in is trying to find some way to show kids how an object can interact and how you can simulate something, and teach a little science lesson with everyday objects.
Being able to take that simulation and and that that thought, you know, and like you said earlier, we're all about hands on, take it and actually make a thing do a thing, I could stand there and tell them bird feeders made out of bottles are important. Or I could say, here are the features of a good bird feeder. Now use these materials to build one, it's not going to look like Sally's, it's not going to look like Jimmy's, you have to think about well, for the birds in my area, I need a flat feeder or to prevent squirrels, I need this kind of roof. And you have to design with only these recycled materials. And so it kind of turns into this whole experience that's going to be more tangible, but also just really held on more to then by those students.
So you make them think a little bit about solving the problem. There's a lot of problem solving that goes on within the projects that you do in these camps. So I know that there are different age levels for kids that you have in these camps. How do you break that down? How do you think about what certain ages will grasp what types of projects that you want to instill in younger kids versus older kid? Are there certain things that you have to keep in mind when you're trying to make an experiment or project, you know, relatable to those ages?
Yeah, the good news is something like crafting from recycled materials. And that's good for all ages. So then really, when you're thinking we have a third through fifth grade bracket, and a sixth through eighth grade with those junior high students, you know, we can go into a little bit more depth about the recycling process. Or if we want to talk about how materials are broken down, or what's you know how chemicals treat this fabric or any, we can kind of dive a little bit more into that. Whereas with younger students, we can mention those things, but kind of do it in a way that's simpler at their level. And then the other kind of fun thing is with younger students, sometimes you may find a craft that's themed around something already targeted to their age level. So I was teaching K through two this morning. And Paw Patrol is so exciting, you know, so if I can link it to, you know, some kids show, whereas an eighth grader Paw Patrol, probably not the route you're gonna go. So it's, it's like a fun puzzle for us sometimes to think about. So here's the academic level of appropriateness. But what's some cool or fun or pop culture, anything that also is going to help tie it in for them?
Well, I know that some of the projects you talked about there from the things that we commonly think about as having to deal with recycling or donating or unused items, you know, use bags, use bottles, even the clothes that we've outgrown, and, you know, haven't donated or something of that sort. But other things that I saw on the list of projects, were something that you would just think about throwing away, and that's broken crayons. And I see that there's a project out of that. Can you tell us about that? And also, are crayons recyclable? I don't know.
Well, the great thing about crayons is that you can melt them down and make new crayons. And that's actually what I really love is that you can use the melting and reforming of crayons to illustrate the rock cycle in geology to so it's really scientifically rich. But yeah, exactly. Crayons is the thing. We may just not even think about. Can I throw this away? Can I recycle this. And so one of the just the most fun things you can do is melt those down, you can put them into muffin tins or shaped molds, you can melt all of the Reds together or you can melt the whole rainbow and then get a crayon that changes color as you use it. So that's definitely a project we've been looking at for these camps.
Now what were you saying about how crayons can demonstrate what was the geology of the rock?
The rock cycle? Yeah, kind of the merging and the formation you know compacting though hating heating up, you know, my husband is actually a junior high science teacher. And in previous years, he's modeled the rock cycle by having kids shave crayons and compact them and melt them to this re formation of a conglomerate rock and it's very cool.
Very interesting. I wouldn't have even thought about that. I guess. You know, it takes maybe a few million years and in the rock cycle, but with crayons, you can speed it up, right?
Yeah. And that's a fun thing about recycling and also just kind of the way that we build projects. Here at Challenger, I mean later this week in my K through two camp, we're going to be talking about life. And we're going to be observing yeast and Alka Seltzer right to just regular kitchen items. We're going to be doing this in depth discussion of life and astrobiology. And so something recyclable, like crayons can transmit to the rock cycle, the engineering of a birdhouse out of recycled materials can really dive into the engineering design process and identifying your stakeholders and their needs, even if they're birds, you know, and just kind of all these things,
any other projects that are coming up in this camp, anything that we haven't covered so far?
I'm really excited about the t shirt tote bag it because it's no so and they're going to be able to carry all of their awesome camp Project Home in it. And we have a couple of old challenger T shirts that we'll be doing that with too. So hey, Challenger center, getting out into the community in more ways.
Sounds great. See, you know, it's a pre advertising as well. So that's nice. Exactly. So as you mentioned a little bit earlier, the ecology Action Center here in the area is involved with this. First of all, for those that don't know, tell us about the ecology Action Center, and then talk about this partnership and how the Challenger Learning Center got involved with this other center.
Yeah, the ecology Action Center is actually located right around uptown ISU, and they, they have all these initiatives to help our community, you know, be more aware of our environment more responsible go greener. In fact, Larissa Armstrong used to work here and continuing education at Heartland and she ended up going on to the EAC. And so she has served as a guest speaker in some of my other programs over the last couple of years. Really fun, very knowledgeable. And so then, as we were putting together this camp, it seemed very natural for us to reach out and say, Hey, called you Action Center, would you be interested in partnering with us, and it's really cool to have someone who's going to come over, you know, talk to the kids, they're going to play a cool game. And partnering with another community partner, like this just kind of has this wide range of benefits from the very practical kids in the classroom hearing from someone other than me, they're gonna pay attention to that other voice, right. And you know, breaking up the day a little bit, kind of ranging all the way to now we have this unified front have multiple community partners, delivering the same message to kids, you know, making sure we're supporting each other in the message that we're delivering, we're giving them a chance to reach kids, they maybe wouldn't normally reach and kind of vice versa, giving them a different venue to do their activities in and then asked to say, Yeah, we we totally support that. And we do support what they do. The Space Center loves Earth. So we are happy to partner with someone local, who wants to help our community take good care of our Earth. It was a really natural partnership. And it's going to be a lot of fun to have them here.
Well, it'd be thanks so much for talking to us today about some of these projects and some of these fun things that kids can do. And open up some wheels I guess or get get some wheels turning in kids heads about the things we use every day and how to think about them after we have finished using them in our household.
Exactly. And you know, if you feel the wheels gumming up right now I bet we can find a recycled bottle cap that we could substitute.
I could use that for the wheel in my brain as a replacement.
Well, thanks for having me on again. It's great to talk to you Steve. I'm really excited about this camp. Thanks, Libby.
Libby torbreck is an educator and flight director at Challenger Learning Center located on the campus of Heartland Community College. If you'd like to learn more about environmental studies, education, or other topics such as history or art, subscribe to our other random acts of knowledge podcasts on Apple podcasts, Spotify, audio boom, or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening
