It’s the only home we have

What you'll need

• Garden gloves and tongs or litter pickers, one set per students
• Three to four garbage bags
• “Litterless story time” slideshow (French version available)
• Digital projector and screen

1. Ask students why they think it’s important to help protect our planet? Encourage them to think about animals, plants, rivers, lakes, forests, parks, and people. 
2. Ask students to share how they feel when they see litter on the ground, and why they think it’s a problem. Litter is ugly and often pollutes the land and water ways. It can be dangerous for animals, who might eat it or get stuck in it and can be dangerous for humans.
3. Discuss that when we take care of the planet, we are protecting humans as well as all our non-human relations. Many cultures, including Indigenous cultures, teach us that we need to respect the Earth and all the beings who live on it, and that we have a responsibility to take care. 

Litter clean up

1. Share with students that we will be going outside to pick up litter, following these safety rules: 
   • Use gloves and tongs or litter pickers to pick up litter, not our hands.
   • Find an adult to help, if we see something sharp, like a needle or broken glass. 
2. Find a location for the class to clean up litter. Consider going to a community space, park, or forest, if possible. Share with students that it’s important to care for our community by picking up litter in our community and not just on the school grounds.
3. Put students in small groups of two to three students to work together; provide them with gloves, and tongs or litter pickers. Head outside with garbage bags; designate one bag for garbage, one bag for items that can be recycled, like cans and bottles and one bag for compost like banana peels if your school has a composting program.

What did we find?

1. After the clean-up, conduct a litter audit by having students take turns spotting an item of litter, identifying it, and making a list on the board. Items found might include plastic straws, plastic sandwich bags, juice box wrappers, cup lids, and cheese string wrappers, cans/bottles and masks or other PPE.
2. After sorting the litter into available waste streams like garbage, composting, and recycling, discuss what they found and where it came from. They will likely discover that a lot of the litter collected was plastic. Plastic litter is especially harmful because it doesn’t break down, and animals eat it and think they are full, depriving their body of needed nutrients from food.
3. Ask students how they feel after picking up the litter. Doing something for our community that keeps all living things on our planet healthy and safe can make us happy and proud.
4. Discuss ways we can all help prevent litter, like making sure we put waste in the correct bin, reducing our waste with actions like a litterless lunch, and safely picking up litter we find.

Take action 

1. Pull up the “Litterless story time” slideshow and at slide 2 explain that as a class, students will complete storybook slides to explore impacts of litter and come up with their own solutions. Indigenous Peoples have cultural traditions that include storytelling. In B.C., Indigenous Peoples use storytelling to guide and teach since it's an impactful way of remembering and learning.
2. At slide 3, read the story about Bubbles the skunk. Next, brainstorm how the story could end with ideas like don’t buy drinks in disposable cups, make sure the cup ends up in the recycling when you’re done, cut the lid in half so it can’t trap an animal and safely pick up litter that we find. 
3. At slide 4, read the story about Peanut the turtle. Ideas on how the story could end include cutting up plastic rings so there are no holes and safely picking up litter that we find.
4. At slide 5, read the story about how we can accidentally litter. Ask students to consider ways to complete the story like checking we have zipped up our backpacks, reminding others kindly, if you see their bags unzipped and safely picking up litter that we find.
5. At slide 6, read the story about garbage in the classroom. Have students think of solutions to reduce garbage like having a litterless lunch, putting snacks in reusable containers, and recycling or composting.
6.  At slide 7, read the story about a plastic disposable water bottle. Ask students how the story could end with ideas like using a reusable water bottle that we fill with tap water and safely picking up litter that we find. Share that saving water is so important; we need water for us, animals and plants and we use it to make electricity in B.C.!
7. At slide 8, review that we can all do our part to protect our planet, keep it beautiful, and make sure all living things are safe and healthy. At slide 9, share that powering down our computers and turning off the lights also protects our planet.