Reducing Food Waste: Grade 3-5 Curriculum Unit
Why focus on food waste?
Americans currently waste nearly 60 million tons of food annually – approximately 325 pounds of food per person per year. Most of this wasted food winds up in landfills, where its decomposition generates greenhouse gasses, including methane and carbon dioxide, that contribute to global warming. Food waste is the largest single category of solid waste deposited in American landfills.
What are challenges to reducing food waste?
Some challenges to reducing food waste in schools include students’ taste preferences, unfamiliarity with menu items, and early meal schedules.Our curriculum provides support for reducing food waste through education in the classroom.
- The curriculum provides students with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) knowledge and skills.
- It motivates and empowers students to take action to protect the environment.
- It gives students practice in critical thinking, problem-solving, communication and collaboration.
The curriculum is standards-based and meets the following NGSS performance expectations in Grades 3-5:
- 3-5-ETS1-1: Define a simple design problem reflecting a need or a want that includes specified criteria for success and constraints on materials, time, or cost.
- 3-5-ETS1-2: Generate and compare multiple possible solutions to a problem based on how well each is likely to meet the criteria and constraints of the problem.
- 5-ESS3-1. Obtain and combine information about ways individual communities use science ideas to protect the Earth’s resources and environment.
Activities to engage students
The curriculum provides a series of activities to help students understand more about solid waste, with a focus on food waste.
We first engage students by asking them to write what they observe about food that is being thrown away and what they are curious about.
Students write a claim about how they could throw away less food.
Students then complete a series of activities that give them more information about food waste in particular and solid waste in general.
In one activity, students collect data on their own class at lunch to measure how much food is thrown away and why it is thrown away.
After completing the series of activities, students revise their claim they made at the beginning of the unit about how could they could throw away less food and now include evidence and reasoning to support their claim.
Students then complete an engineering design activity to find solutions for reducing food waste in their school.
Springboard to school initiatives
The curriculum activities can be a springboard to support an existing or new student environmental initiative that encourages wider participation among students and adults in the school community and to make connections with local environmental efforts and facilities.
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