life? cycle?

What, I wondered aloud, does the term ‘life cycle’ mean?  After all, we would be looking at life cycles during the coming weeks.

Blank faces all round.

OK then, let’s take each word separately.  Think about the word ‘life’.  And think about the word ‘cycle’.  Think about where you have heard them used.  Maybe you have even used them yourself.

Then perhaps you can draw a picture to show me what you understand.  Or what you don’t understand; that’s OK too!  We can share what we know.

So ‘life’ would appear to have to do with being alive (and ‘not dead’ as Yousouf pointed out).

    

And ‘cycles’ (bi-cycles or tri-cycles) of course are what we ride on round and round and round the garden.

Some of us have even heard grown-ups talk about the need to ‘(re)cycle for life’.

    

Right.  Let’s take what we each know so far and put it all together and see what happens.

We’ll start with the word (re)cycle.  What do you do when you recycle something?

‘You put it in a special bin’, Yanis tells us.

And yes, we do; we have shiny new recycling bins for our food waste and our plastic and our metal out in the playground. 

And we have a special cardboard box for our waste paper right here in the classroom!

But what happens to it next?  Does anyone know what happens to our classroom waste paper?

Here’s what.  Our paper is taken from our classroom recycling box (yes, you’ve seen Tafi doing that) and put into a BIG recycling container in the car park along with all the paper from all the other recycling boxes in the school.  Each week a special truck comes along and takes everything in the container off to the recycling plant (that’s another name for a factory).

In the recycling plant, the paper is chopped up and mixed with water and then squished and squashed through a special rolling machine to make it very long and thin.  And once it has dried it is rolled ready to be cut up and taken to the shops - so we can buy it and use it.

And once we have used it, we put the waste into the special cardboard box right here in the classroom.  And then it is taken from our classroom recycling box (yes, you saw  Tafi doing that just now!) and put into a BIG recycling container in the car park (you know the one!)  And each week, a special truck comes along and takes everything in the container off to the recycling plant where it is chopped up and mixed with water and then squished and squashed through a special rolling machine to make it very long and thin.  And once it has dried it is rolled, ready to be cut up and taken to the shops - so we can buy it and use it.

And once we have used it, we put the waste into the special cardboard box right here in the classroom. And then it is taken from our classroom recycling box (poor Tafi, all that lifting and emptying!) and put into that BIG recycling container in the car park.  And each week, a special truck comes along and takes everything in the container off to the recycling plant where it is chopped up and mixed with water and then squished and squashed through a special rolling machine to make it very long and thin. And once it has dried it is rolled, ready to be cut up and taken to the shops - so we can buy it and use it.

Round and round and round it goes.  Just like the wheels on those bi- and tri-cycles.