Glad Wrap Snails - Queenstown Primary

Mrs. Fergusson set about doing a school wide experiment without anyone knowing. She had a plan afoot and decided a little secrecy was perhaps the best way of going about. She wanted to show the school the problem they have with Glad Warp and their lunches.

The idea was that her class was collecting Glad Wrap for an art project. They collected as much Glad Wrap as they could lay their hands on from school lunches for the first four days of the week. They collected 2 huge black bin sacks full of the stuff. The plan was for the artwork to be unveiled at the school assembly on Friday afternoon.

It wasn't until Friday morning that she told her class that the art project was in fact to build a huge glad wrap snail to help demonstrate how much glad wrap is used for school lunches and hopefully shock a few students and parents into moving towards a packaging free lunch.

I was asked if I could go along and help facilitate the making of the snail. It seemed like a fabulous idea to me and a great way for me to meet a senior class.

Everyone in the class was so into it, especially once they found out what it was for. We all had a go at twisting the bits of Glad Wrap and then tieing reef knots between each piece to form a very long piece of Glad Warp.

We recorded on the board how many meters had been twisted together and the then strip was hand d over to the snail maker group. Mrs. Fergusson had the fantastic idea of sticking 6 real estate boards together to make a board to mount the shell onto. We all thought this was going to be enough. How wrong we all were.

As it turns out there was almost 350m of Glad Wrap collected. We managed to make 3 adult snails shells spanning 6 real estate boards each. The rest of the snail was painted onto the boards and then the class presented them to the whole school during assembly. They are going to repeat the experiment at the end of term one. fingers crossed we will only have some baby snails....

I think this is a fantastic way to visually how much of this non recyclable waste is generated in Queesntown Primary in one week. The class have also prepared some information for parents to go in the school newsletter so they can find out how easy it is for their children to have a packaging free lunch.

Well done Mrs. Fergussons class, job well done!
Look we even made the paper! Get a copy of this weeks Queenstown Mirror and have a look. Well done Queenstown Primary.