Working for Scraps: Worm Farms for the Classroom

This lesson is designed to build students’ competencies in the following skills:

• creative thinking
• critical thinking
• collaboration
• enterprise
• leadership
• prototyping

Australian Curriculum (v9.0) content description:

Syllabus outcomes:

Year 3 - Science

• explain the roles and interactions of consumers, producers and decomposers within a habitat and how food chains represent feeding relationships (AC9S4U01)

Year 4 - Science

• compare characteristics of living and non-living things and examine the differences between the life cycles of plants and animals (AC9S3U01)

General capabilities: Critical and Creative Thinking, Literacy, Numeracy

Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability

Relevant parts of Year 3 & 4 achievement standards: Students classify and compare living and non-living things. They identify the roles of organisms in a habitat and construct food chains.

UN SDG 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

• Target 12.5: By 2030, substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse

• Device to share videos with students
• Whiteboard and/or butcher's paper and pens
• Worm Farms: Getting Started Factsheet

These lessons were created in partnership with Planet Ark and Coles.

Planet Ark’s National Recycling Week started in 1996 to bring a national focus to the environmental benefits of recycling. This highly regarded annual campaign continues to educate and stimulate behaviour change by promoting kerbside, industrial and community recycling initiative. It also gives people the tools to minimise waste and manage material resources responsibly at home, work and school. In partnership with Planet Ark, we have developed lessons from early learning through to year 10 to help educators bring these important topics into the classroom.

National Recycling Week is held in the second week of November each year but you can recycle all year-round with these lessons which were designed to be used at any time. Click here to find out more about National Recycling Week and the Schools Recycle Right Challenge.