Recycling Sort

Eight things are printed in a strip across the top of this kindergarten page, each with a small coral dot beneath it, and five tall bins stand along the bottom with their names on tabs: Paper, Plastic, Glass, Metal and Compost. The sheet shown offers a notebook, a sauce bottle, a carrot, a bucket, a corn cob, a bolt, a sheet of paper and a glue bottle. The child draws a line from each thing down to the bin it goes in once it is empty or finished.

Five bins and eight things means the bins do not fill evenly, so a child cannot finish by dealing one item to each. They have to decide what a thing is made of, which is a harder question than it looks when a sauce bottle could be glass or plastic and a notebook is paper with a card cover. The two food items go to compost, which is the bin most children have not met and the one worth talking about first.

One sheet, eight lines, five bins. The band between the strip and the bins is left open for the lines to cross. This is the base page of the recycling family: the which-bin sheet turns the same job into a choice of five, and the what-is-it-made-of sheet asks for the material by name instead of by bin.