The objective of a recycling practice lesson is to give first-graders the opportunity to demonstrate how to sort items for recycling. Collect several items from the four major recycling categories. These categories are glass, metal, plastic and paper. Explain to your first-graders that if all these items were thrown away, we'd have great big piles of garbage all over. When we recycle them, there is less garbage and our world is cleaner. Put out bins, preferably in the colors used in your community, for the different categories. Explain that goods have to be sorted into different bins for recycling based on what the item is made of. Have students practice sorting each item you have into the correct bin.
Explain to your first-graders that part of recycling is finding new ways to use things that would otherwise get thrown out. One way to recycle is to create arts and crafts objects with items that have already served their primary use. Develop a craft project around something such as empty egg cartons, milk cartons, plastic soda bottles or pencil stubs. Some examples might be making a caterpillar out of empty egg cartons, planting a flower in a milk carton, making sand art in a soda bottle or making a simple three-dimensional mosaic with pencil stubs. Show students other objects and ask them what ideas they can come up with. First-graders are usually eager to share some pretty grandiose ideas.
Communicate the concepts of recycling through dramatic play. Have students form four lines. Tell one line that they represent plastics, another represents paper, another represents glass and another metal. First tell them that they're all going to go to a landfill and have everyone pile into one small area. Then have them go back into their lines saying, "Wow! That's too crowded." Have each of them think of something that they might be made of their material. Have students come up one-by-one to you and say, "Don't send me to the landfill!" Respond with, "Who are you and why shouldn't I send you to the landfill?" They then tell you what they are and give you a way they can be reused. For example, "I'm a cardboard box and I can be used to store your treasures." You can then send each child to a different area of the room representing a different recyclable material.
Show students an aluminum pop can and tell them what it is made of. Introduce the word "biodegrade" to students and explain to them what it means. Then ask them to guess how long it would take for an aluminum pop can to biodegrade in a landfill. Then ask each child to stand up one at a time and say her age. Write that number on the board and then add the age of the next child until you've gone through the entire room. Add your age as well. Then point out that if you added everyone's age together, you still are only halfway to the number of years that it takes for an aluminum can to degrade (this assumes you have approximately 30 students who are 6 and 7 years old). It takes 500 years for an aluminum can to biodegrade.