Landfill Pie

The kids have settled a little bit more today, but not a whole lot.  All week I've been reminding them to fill out their Reading Notebooks so we can pass out BINGO prizes for the quarter... apparently no one paid attention to my directions because when I was ready to do the prizes, no one else was.  A whole lot of, "Just a minute, I'm almost done!" and "I don't know where my Reading Notebook/BINGO sheet is!" filled the room.  Sigh.  Only five of the 15 completed a BINGO.  Some read a bunch of books, just not five in a row to earn a prize.  I suppose it's just as well I didn't buy a bunch of new prizes.

Our other big thing of the day was making Landfill Pie.  The test on ecosystems is tomorrow, so we did a mini-lab demonstration to show the layers in a landfill.  Graham cracker crust to represent the clay, a layer of fruit roll ups for the plastic, then licorice for the leachate pipes and another layer of cookie crumbs for the gravel.  For trash we used vanilla pudding, sprinkles (vegetable/plant waste), oatmeal (paper/cardboard), white chocolate chips (plastics), chocolate chips (metals), butterscotch chips (glass), marshmallows (diapers), and cheerios (tires).  As a final touch, we drizzled chocolate syrup on top (leachate), a layer of vanilla pudding/fruit roll ups (more plastic sheeting), Oreo cookie crumbs (soil), and green coconut (grass).  Two straws got poked in the top as methane gas collectors.  I got the idea from my 5th and 6th grade teacher all those years ago...

It looked really cool, was tricky to cut, and looked disgusting on a plate.  Some of the kids tried it!  Most thought it was yucky.  Only one girl, bless her heart, said she liked it and it was good.  The other girls mostly picked through it and ate out the good stuff.  "The cheerios don't do anything for it," one of the girls told me as she tried a bite.  I'm not too tore up about it; hopefully the grossness will help them remember the layers of the landfill!