I wasn't going to post about this particular holiday activity. I thought it might seem a little strange that this was our first family activity this school break. But my friend post here about the litter problem in her part of the world so I have decided to share.
After walking through our local park last Saturday I was shocked by the amount of rubbish. I usually drive past this reserve as there is no play equipment and it is really just a gully with a small creek between two roads. Local high school students walk through it each day. My theory is that the buy food at the local shops and then drop the rubbish when they finish each as the rubbish only starts after a certain point in the park.
Any way the point is that Sunday I bought small gloves and rubbish bags and Monday I took my 4 DD's to the park to clean up. I may have added a small amount of motivation by offering some chocolate eggs when we finished but the oldest 3 girls were very keen. Poor little Miss F was kept strapped into the pram as I didn't want her eating the rubbish or running into the creek.
They enjoyed themselves and filled 3 kitchen sized bags with rubbish. The park is cleaner and will most probably stay that way until Tuesday week when students return to school. But we had our own Clean Up Australia Day for the holdays.
Now if I could get them to clean up the house.
2 comments:
It is weird how kids find it fun to pick up stranger's rubbish, but not their own mess. A couple of weeks ago Ben's 'best thing' for the day (it's a nightly ritual for us each to tell each other before we pray - so we can thank God for it) was picking up rubbish during lunchtime play time at school! It was totally voluntary on his part - although I think some of the attraction was that the teacher gave them a pair of kitchen tongs to pick up the rubbish with kitchen tongs (his school is a leader in environmentally friendly stuff, so they wouldn't like gloves as they need to be thrown in landfill).
I hadn't even thought of tongs. Great idea. I did get some reusable gloves, so they won't go straight into land fill but I do see the irony of consuming more to buying more to clean up.
Encouraging children to touch other peoples rubbish doesn't seem like a good idea so if we make a habit of it I might have to get some tongs.
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