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Teaching Your Preschooler To Recycle
By Marie-Helen Goyetche
right answers and some really creative ones too. We showed them items that can be reused, reduced and recycled and brought it down to their level." 
Examples of reusable items are toilet paper rolls, papers written on one side, baby wipe boxes, cork, bottle caps, fabric and paper scraps. The goal is to find new uses for something rather than putting it into the garbage.
"This leads us to ask about reusing food," explains Sofia. "The children thought long before answering but by using a glass fish bowl we showed them how to make compost. We only put in fruit and vegetable scraps, eggshells and a few dead leaves from outside and in no time the materials turned into soil. We have a bigger pail to put in the non-meat food scraps and an adult brings it outdoors to our composting bin. When we have our planting theme we use the composted soil and we always have really pretty flowers.
"Reducible items are things we tried to avoid buying or bought in big quantities instead of buying little packages to reduce the mount of garbage. The child understood this with serving containers such as the yogurt containers -- rather than buy 24 little ones, buy four big ones. That reduced the amount in plastic containers. The children also were showed that energy such as running water and electricity were items that also need to be reduced and used only when needed. Lights off in empty rooms, flushing the toilet for no reason and making sure the water was turned off after hand washing were all concepts children clearly understood."
"Using real dishes and real cutlery rather than plastic ones also made sense to them," says Jennifer. "Because they had them on hand and they didn't need to throw them away -- we could wash them and use them again and again."
Recyclable items such as newspaper, plastic, aluminum and glass were separated from the regular garbage and placed in the blue recycle box ready for the weekly pickup from the recycle truck. The recycle symbol was then introduced -- it can be found on the blue boxes and the recycle trucks.
