So this has been funny, interesting, special, and "out of the box" as usual with children. A true hackathon of hackathons. First, they chose from a deck of cards with some other Climate Change words related the word "Plastic" as their challenge word. Then we use all our senses to "feel" and compare better wood characteristics with plastic. Plastic is cold, wood is warm. Plastic is death, wood is alive, Plastic is boring, wood is interesting. Plastic is heavy, wood is light. Plastic can't breathe, wood breaths. Plastic can't be wet, wood can be wet. Plastic doesn't smell (but smells ugly if we burn it), and wood smell well. We feel that wood is better than plastic.
Now it's time for the question: make our class better by substituting plastic with wood. In groups of 3,4, they should punt a sticker in the objects of the classroom they think are made of plastic. We are now detectives trying to know the "guts" of the objects. Little by little they realize how much plastic is around us. Two much! What we can do? Try to substitute with other materials like wood, our nice, friendly, and warm wood. Can we do something like that? That's our challenge: Substitute as many plastic objects as possible in our classroom with wood objects: pencils, glasses, laptops, furniture, .bottles, vases, toys. We put all the plastic objects replaced in a big pile, the "boring pile". We celebrate together our new classroom distribution. We move better, we are happier, we are healthier, we are more protected, and we are more connected with nature and ourselves. But this is not the end of the challenge. Each group will play doing the same during the weekend creating their own "boring pile" in their sleep rooms, then in the kitchen, then in the living room, and so on. Families take pictures and send them to us. The challenge is now a family, neighboured game. Children audit the places where they live, play, and learn to make them "plastic-free" zones. Living, soft, cozy, warm, friendly places, not dead places (plastic is made by millions of very old dinos skeletons! Puaj! A great discovery was made by some of them.