DBC Lesson Plan Example

On November 1st, Halloween decorations and candy can be found across the country at 50% off as the stores make room for their Christmas displays.

I decided to teach my kindergarten class about the need to reuse our plastic candy wrappers so that they don’t end up in our waterways. First, I asked them how they thought the wrappers end up in the water and they had several ideas, until a little girl guessed that wrappers end up in the water because kids eat their candy and litter (on purpose or by accident), and the wind blows their wrappers into the waters. What they didn’t know is that the wrappers melt and become very tiny pieces of plastic called microplastics, and the fish may end up eating these plastics. The 3, 4 and 5 year olds said that this made them sad and that we must make sure the plastic doesn’t end up in the water. They really wanted to do something to help, so we decided to pick up the Halloween litter.

We armed ourselves with rubber gloves and took to the yard to begin our hunt for plastic candy wrappers. Due to the pandemic, I had a good discussion with the children about picking up only wrappers as there are some masks on the yard at the moment too. We call the coronavirus the “bad bug” in our classroom and we talked about the importance of not putting our fingers in our eyes or mouth.

Sure enough, just on our school yard, we found quite the Halloween wrapper haul after only about 30 minutes of searching.

I washed and dried the wrappers, and then I cut them into little strips. The kids were asked to glue each strip on to a piece of green construction paper that I had cut out and folded into the form of a Christmas card. We glued each strip of the candy wrappers until they resembled a Christmas tree. I taped the trees to the construction paper as I noticed the glue stick doesn’t quite work on the candy wrappers. You may have better luck with liquid glue, but moving tape works perfectly.

This was a fun activity and most importantly the children learned that Halloween wrappers can’t be recycled, and they had their first experience with upcycling wrappers into cards for the very next holiday we celebrate in Canada after Halloween! I also found a cute turkey online made out of candy wrappers for Americans who celebrate their thanksgiving after Halloween.

The children are very excited to give their parents their creations at Christmas time. A great follow up activity is writing a letter to their parents or guardians inside these candy wrapper cards. Now, hopefully we can keep the cards a secret until Christmas!

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