Foundation Class 

MAKING RECYCLED PAPER IN PREP

As part of our sustainability focus in the Foundation classroom this term, we decided to look at how paper is made. This allowed the students to engage in rich sensory play while learning about the process involved in recycling paper.

Once the students tore up all our scrap paper, we soaked it in water overnight. This made it much easier to break it down into pulp. We discussed how the water helped the fibres in the paper to separate and become suspended in the liquid. This was also a perfect opportunity to introduce new language and expand our vocabularies.

After everyone had a chance to feel and move the pulp around, it was time for the next step. The general consensus was, that it felt really soft and fluffy, providing a fantastic sensory experience for the students. 

It was then time to reverse the process by making it back into paper and we had to remove all the water. The preps had to squeeze all the water out of the pulp before smoothing it out on trays. 

Here was our finished product.

The students were all very surprised by how thick it felt (due mostly to some enthusiastic clumping of pulp) and excited that they could still see some of the letters in the newspaper and pieces of coloured scrap paper.