Where does all this stuff come from?

Teacher: Amanda Hernandez

Area: Social Studies

Topic: Sustainability - Conservation

Grade: 5th
Materials:

A lunch box with various items in it (grapes, sandwich, chips, etc.)
Loose leaf paper for drawing
Chalkboard
Large world map
Stick pins
Yarn
Computers
 

Standards:

UW-Madison Teacher Standards:

STANDARD 8: EMPLOYS VARIED ASSESSMENT PROCESSES


Teachers understand and thoughtfully use formal and informal evaluation strategies to assess students’ achievements, strengths, challenges and learning styles for continuous development.
 

MMSD Standards:

Geography: Use map and globe reading skills.
 

Wisconsin DPI Social Studies Standards:

Students in Wisconsin will learn about production, distribution, exchange, and consumption so that they can make informed economic decisions.
 

Objectives:

SWBAT understand how their desk items and lunch box items got to our classroom. 

SWBAT discuss how they can reduce their carbon footprint.

SWBAT locate various countries on a map.

 

Lesson Opening:

            Ask students if they ever wondered where all the items that they buy come from.  Ask students to look in their desks to see how many items they have.  Students may have 20 or 30 different things stored in their desks, and each of these come from a different place in the world.  Ask students how they think these things get into their desk.  Have them draw a picture of the items in their desk and how they think they made it to their desks.  Have student write a paragraph about the processes that occur so that these items can make it into their desks.

 

Procedure:

Tell students that you are getting a little hungry and want to check out what you brought for lunch today to maybe have a little snack.  Take out the items in your lunch box (not bag!) and show what you have to the class.  It helps to have one item that comes from a single location (example: grapes might come from Chile).  Tell students that you bought these grapes at the grocery store and that you read that they are from Chile. 
Ask one student to come up and put a stick pin in the map where we are, and one in the map in Chile.  Tie the yarn in between the two pins.  That a long way for the grapes to travel to get to your mouth!
On the chalkboard, ask students where the grapes started from and have a student come and draw where they come from (Chile).  Then, ask students how they think the grapes got to Madison.  Have a student come and draw a plane after the country and draw a line from one to the next.  Have another student come and draw the grocery store that the grapes were bought at.  Ask students how the grapes got to your house and have them draw that transportation route as well, connecting all drawings.  That is a very long way to travel!  The grapes must be tired!  It took a lot of energy and fuel to get from Chile to Madison. 
Take out the sandwich from your lunch box and ask students to investigate where they think the sandwich came from.  Make sure students understand that there are many components to a sandwich and each of these comes from a different place. After they hypothesize, tell them where each of the components are from, but that for example the bread has 10 ingredients that each come from different places.  Have students come up to the map and plot the countries where each of these components comes from. 
Have students take 3 items out of their desks.  Tell them that their job is to find out where each of the items comes from and to put a push pin where the beginning of their item’s journey started.  Some items are easy because they say right on them where they are from, but others may take research on the computer.  Allow children to work on the computers with supervision.
 

Lesson Closing:

            Once students have all their item’s locations on the map, ask them what they think about this.  What does it take for all these things to get to our desks?  A lot of energy and fuel is used to move these items around which creates a greater carbon footprint.  The farther an item has to travel, the bigger it’s carbon footprint.  Ask students what they think they could do to stop creating bigger carbon footprints.

 

Assessment:

            Students will be assessed informally in discussion groups about where their items come from and what they can do to reduce carbon footprints.  Students will be formally assessed by the drawings and paragraph they created regarding where their items came from and by completing the task of locating their countries or cities on the map.