What Can I Do Teachers' Notes

Suggestions for Post Show Class Discussions.

Q. What is an environmental footprint?
A. You use things (food, timber, minerals, water) from the planet. When you use these things you produce waste. Then you use water to wash yourself, the waste you produce is dirty water that now has soap and shampoo and hair conditioner in it. The planet must then deal with this waste. We can measure this waste. The measurement of this waste is what we call an environment footprint.
Think of it this way. If every person on the earth destroyed an area of land the size of two soccer fields a year, that would be alright. Why? Because the earth can regenerate, recover from that much use a year.

The problem is
Q: What size is your environmental footprint or ecological footprint?
A. Each Australian uses, destroys an area of land the size of eight soccer fields a year. That's right, about four times more than what the earth can regenerate / recover from.

Q. What can you do?
A. Reduce your environmental footprint.

Q. How?
A. By changing some of the things that we do.

Q. What were the ways of reducing your environmental footprint that you were told about during the performance of What Can I Do?
A.   Turn off the light when you leave the room.
A.   Turn off the TV, Radio, Computer when you finish with them.
A.   Turn off the tap when you are finished with the water. Make sure the tap is not dripping. Have shorter showers. It is suggested that you can get just as clean from a two minute shower as you would be after a ten minute shower.

Q. Is it OK to throw some things from the car in the country? Things like food scraps, surely animals and insects will eat them or they will decompose and enrich the soil. What about paper? It will eventually break down. It was made from a tree to begin with.

A. The fact that animals will be attracted to eat the food scraps by the roadside is one of the very reasons why we shouldn't throw food on country roads. The edge of the road is no place for animals to be feeding. If they get hit by a car or truck they will almost certainly die. Even worse, fatal car accidents can happen as drivers swerve to miss animals on the road and crash into ditches and trees.
Papers thrown from cars look unsightly and driving down a country road littered with paper can seem more like driving through a rubbish tip. You may only throw one small piece of paper but if every one of the tens or hundreds or thousands of people who travel that road every day of the year throw one piece of paper, it soon adds up. Lots of paper, newspapers and boxes can also fuel bush fires helping them to get started.
The only thing to do with your rubbish is to recycle it or put it in a rubbish bin.

Resource link for Environment Footprint http://www.epa.vic.gov.au/ecologicalfootprint/default.asp

Class Projects

How much rubbish does your household generate a year ?

How much rubbish does your school / community generate in a year ?

By finding out how much rubbish is taken away from your school and how often it is taken away, and doing some simple mathematics you should be able to get a fairly good idea of how much rubbish is created by your school each year. Be sure to allow for the holidays when the amount of rubbish should decrease. For example, if you have an amount of 30 big dump bins a year, measure the size of the bin, multiply it by the number of times the bin is emptied and compare it to the size of your classroom. Would the amount of rubbish dumped by the school each year half fill your classroom, fill your classroom or....... ?

You could do the same exercise with the garbage from home.
Multiplying your garbage from home each year by the number of houses in the town would give you some idea of the amount of garbage generated by homes in the community. It would only be a rough idea because a house with only one person would generate less rubbish then the house of a large family and of course factories and industries generate a lot more than households. Why not do some calculations, add a little guess work and come up with an amount, then phone the local council. They will probably give you a more accurate figure and you can compare your figure to theirs. (Phone the council first to find out if they have a figure of tonnes or cubic metres.)

It's really a very simple construction so I won't go into a lot of written detail about the assembly.
Cut out a V shaped mouth from both sides of one of the toilet rolls and from the other cut away to create the tail shape.
Its a good idea to paint them before you sticky tape them together as paint doesn't always take well over the top of sticky tape; remember that you may want the design to go across the two rolls.
Cut some toe shapes into the feet at both ends of both of the cardboard leg pieces. Fold the legs at the ankle and the hip leaving enough card to tape to the underside of the lizard. Its important to fold both the legs the same so mark where the folds are to go first. ( a tip:- to help the legs support the weight of the lizard, a piece of tape on the outside of the leg and onto the lizard's body is a great help , as shown opposite.)
That's about it.
A string from the head and another from the tail attached to a rod about the same length will turn it into a puppet.
It doesn't have a lot of movement, but it can certainly be moved around and raising it up onto its back legs is very effective.
One last step (not shown in illustration) Attach a flat piece of material as a tail. Make it wide at the end it attaches to the lizard and taper it to a point at the end. To the end of the tail attach another string. Now you have a lizard with a wicked moving tail.
Enjoy!

Remember the Puppet Davo from the Show Well now meet Davo when he was a baby.

Davo has to be able to sit down without falling over because the performer cannot hold the puppet for the whole show.	the puppeteer has to be able to move his head from side to side and be sure that the head will not fall forward or back when the puppet to left alone.	So the head fits into a cylinder


Add a leg here,	add an arm there	Two of each is best and

No! No! No! That's not right.

Because the puppet Davo has to be able to sit by himself without the puppeteer holding him, a number of things were done.

1. His bottom was made flat and solid (heavy)
2. His head was given a special cup or cradle to fit into.
3. The top part of his legs were made flat.
4. Inserts (cavities) were made in his bottom for these flat parts of his legs to fit into so his bottom would still sit flat on the play board.

All this was done to ensure that Davo didn't fall over.