Freshkillspark.org



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Students will gain more from their field trip experience if it is connected to activities done in the classroom. Use this guide as a springboard for classroom activities that can be done before or after your trip. Don’t miss the critical park planner post-trip activity that complements the trip.

Before Your Field Trip

Vocabulary:

Landfill: An area where large amounts of trash are placed and covered with soil

Landfill Gas: The gas that is released by the landfill, half methane and half carbon dioxide

Leachate: The liquid byproduct of the landfill produced when water runs through the garbage

Decomposition: Decay; the state or process of rotting

Park Planner: Someone who creates designs for future parks

Activities:

A History of Trash: Have students read this interview about the history of trash in NYC:

. This interview provides background information that will contextualize the human relationship with waste. After reading the article, students should then come up with similar interview style questions to ask about trash collection in NYC today. In the course of their upcoming field trip, they can try to find answers to at least one of their questions.

Weigh The Waste: This hands-on activity gives students insight into what makes up their trash, with potential to incorporate math and graphing lessons.

Build a Model Landfill: students learn about landfills by creating their own. They can even test if the water has leached out into the neighboring community.



Critical Reading: Have your students read the attached excerpt from Picking Up by Robin Nagle and answer questions using the worksheet.

Picking Up by Robin Nagle (p. 113)

“For centuries, the city had consigned her waste to her waters. From the earliest European settlement, garbage was tossed along the shoreline, first with casual disregard but soon with the deliberate intention of building land. Eventually, the port’s slips were so filled with garbage that ships couldn’t berth. In 1857, the state ordered dumping moved farther into the harbor. Debris floated ashore in New Jersey. The dumping zone was moved again, in 1872, to an area off southeastern Staten Island. The foul loads killed what had been profitable fishing grounds and oyster beds, and trash that didn’t sink still found its way to shore—exactly as increasingly irate citizens in New Jersey and Staten Island had predicted. Waste that did sink started to choke shipping channels. In 1883, more than nine ocean steamers ran aground when they were arriving in or leaving New York. Garbage, declared some, was becoming “the ruin of a noble harbor.”

Vocabulary

Consigned: assign; commit decisively or permanently.

Disregard: pay no attention to; ignore.

Deliberate: done consciously and on purpose.

Slip: a ship's or boat's berth between two piers.

Berth: a ship's allotted place at a wharf or dock.

Debris: scattered fragments, typically of something wrecked or destroyed.

Irate: feeling or characterized by great anger.

Q: Why was it bad that New York dumped trash into waterways?

Q: What else do you think people might have done with their garbage in the past?

Q: What do we do with our garbage today?

After your Field Trip

Activities:

Park Planning Exercise: This critical follow-up exercise allows students to synthesize what they have learned on their field trip and design a plan of their own for Freshkills (45 minutes)

Materials: Blank Park plans for each student (ideally printed large at 11 by 17), fine markers, colored pencils, regular pencils and erasers, rulers

Goals:

• Students will synthesize the information about the landfill infrastructure, community, and wildlife they learned on a field trip Freshkills

• Students will gain decision making experience as they make decisions about planning their version of Freshkills Park

• Students will become familiar with mapping concepts such as creating a key and scale

• Students will learn more about careers in Parks, and what it means to be a park planner

Outline:

Part 1: Brainstorming (5 minutes)

• Explain to students that they will get to create their own design for the future Freshkills Park.

• Have students pull out their park planner booklets from the field trip and review the last page where they listed how they will take into account the landfill infrastructure, the needs of the community, and the wildlife in their plans for the park.

• Give them a minute to brainstorm a list of things that they would like to see in their park (use this instruction sheet for prompting or as a handout)

Part 2: Create a scale and a key (10 minutes)

• Review the concept of a map’s scale. Pass out the Map and take a look at some of the parks amenities that have been created to scale. Talk about how the 2,200 acres of the park is very large, equivalent to 1,667 football fields.

• On a separate sheet of paper, have students use rulers to create scaled icons for the objects that they might want to add to their map. Have them start making a key on the bottom of their map.

Part 3: Planning (20 minutes)

• Have students think about which activities go well next to each other, and which wouldn’t (i.e. would you put a basketball court next to a school, senior center, or fountain?)

• Talk about the specific building constraints for the site

o Can’t put buildings on top of mounds (fields etc. are OK) because of land subsidence

o Can’t build in the wetlands (would destroy important habitats and buildings would sink)

• Have students start drawing the items they brainstormed on to their map using colored pencils and regular pencils

• As the planning progresses, prompt with…

o Where will the natural areas be? Explain that you can shade large areas in a specific color to denote this. Will there be multiple types of natural areas? Challenge students to distinguish which areas will be grasslands, wetlands, and forests

o What will be the plan for circulation? How will people get around your park? Will all the roads be open to vehicles, or maybe just some? None? Will there be separate paths for bikes, runners and walkers or will they all have to share?

o How does your plan take into account the issues of the community that you prioritized in your discussions? What trade-offs might you have to make to accommodate these needs?

o If time allows: you have a limited budget. Which areas of the park would you prioritize? Write a three stage plan for implementing your park plan.

Part 4: Review and wrap up (10 minutes)

• Have each student share their favorite feature of their park

• Discuss with students if there were any trade-offs that they had to make to accommodate the environment, the landfill infrastructure, or the needs of the community. Ask if anyone put something in their park that they wouldn’t personally use.

• Discuss what happens next in the park-planning process

o People vote on the plans they like best

o The winning plans get taken back into the community for more input. In the case of Freshkills Park, this took 3 years

o Plans are implemented in stages because of budgetary constraints

Trash to Treasure: groups of students use the materials from a landfill to create useful products (time = 90 minutes)

Resources

Freshkills Park Website:

Grow NYC recycling champions:

NYC Waste Less:

National Environmental Education Week: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle curriculum:

If you develop helpful curricula or find other useful activities, please let us know and we will include them in this guide to share with other educators. We would also love comments about how well these activities worked for your class.

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Pre and Post Materials

Park Planner Grades 6-8

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