How Much Trash Can You Stash?

💡Skills: Fitting trash into a garbage truck helps your child practice basic geometry skills. Sorting trash and recycling items is a great way to help our Earth! 

Description

PAW Patrol’s Rocky knows that sanitation workers are the Earth Heroes who pick up garbage and recycling from homes and stores. Play a math estimation game to see if you can help the sanitation workers fit more into the truck!

Materials 

☑ Truck or box

☑ Scissors

☑ Tape

☑ Crayons, markers, or pencils

Set Up 

Here’s how to explain this activity to your child:

• Rocky from PAW Patrol knows that it’s not easy to get everything to fit into the back of a Recycle Truck.

• Let’s be heroes to the Earth by making our own sanitation vehicle (or “garbage truck” or “recycling truck”) out of a box or using a truck we have at home.

• Now, let’s gather up a pile of toys (like blocks) or other things from around home to represent our garbage or recycling.

• How many objects do you think can fit into our sanitation vehicle? Let’s make a guess and then count how many really fit! Let’s dump everything out and try again. Can we fit in more “trash” on our second try?

Pro Tip:

If your little recycler needs a challenge, work together to create a recycling center in your home with space for glass, metal, plastic, and paper. Talk about how recycling works and how it’s different from trash. If this activity is a little too hard, use a bag to pick up pieces of paper to recycle from around home. How many pieces of paper can you collect?

Extend the Learning

Read “I Stink” by Kate & Jim McMullan to learn about a spunky garbage truck, create your own Rocky vehicle, and learn about composting with the help of Rocky!

Words to Use 

• Represent– to stand for
  

• Trash – something that is not used anymore and is thrown away
  

• Garbage – another word for trash
  

• Recycle – to reuse something or to convert waste into reusable materials
  

• Sanitation – to make sure something is clean and healthy
  

• Vehicle – used to transport things, like a car or truck