This guide will help students develop a reusable shopping bag swap station for a grocery local store.
Students will learn about the environmental impacts of single-use plastic bags and single-use plastic bag legislation.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This is a community action guide that will help teachers and students create and implement a local reusable bag program.
The guide contains reading material on single-use plastics.
Additional Prerequisites
Teachers will need to allocate an appropriate amount of time for planning and putting this project into action.
Some of the links in the guide do not work.
Differentiation
Schools could use this resource for a school-wide Earth Day service project.
Art classes could design and decorate reusable bags.
This is a "low floor, high ceiling" project as the basic idea of creating a reusable bag station is fairly simple, but the work can be taken further into areas such as public policy.
Civics classes could read about bag legislation and discuss how legislation works on the community, state, and national levels.
Scientist Notes
There is no contradiction in the article. This resource is recommended.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-3 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Civics
D2.Civ.13.9-12 Evaluate public policies in terms of intended and unintended outcomes, and related consequences.
Dimension 4: Taking Informed Action
D4.7.6-8 Assess their individual and collective capacities to take action to address local, regional, and global problems, taking into account a range of possible levers of power, strategies, and potential outcomes.
D4.7.9-12 Assess options for individual and collective action to address local, regional, and global problems by engaging in self-reflection, strategy identification, and complex causal reasoning.
Common Core English Language Arts Standards (CCSS.ELA)
Reading: History/Social Studies (6-12)
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.3 Identify key steps in a text's description of a process related to history/social studies (e.g., how a bill becomes law, how interest rates are raised or lowered).
Common Core Math Standards (CCSS.MATH)
Statistics & Probability: Making Inferences & Justifying Conclusions (9-12)
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSS.IC.B.4 Use data from a sample survey to estimate a population mean or proportion; develop a margin of error through the use of simulation models for random sampling.
CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSS.IC.B.6 Evaluate reports based on data.
