Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i Click Science and Discovery Magazine for Preschoolers and Young Children

Hoses suck up leaves, dirt, and rocks into the holding bin. Some street sweepers spray water to wash away dust and dirt. Street sweepers come in all sizes! Smaller ones are great for cleaning narrow side streets. The holding bin is emptied into a landfill. When the street sweeper cleans up leaves, the leaves can become compost. Sometimes hoses push air out. The strong blast of air blows dirt off the street but doesn’t suck it up. Spinning brushes near the front tires scrub the street clean. On some sweepers, everything brushed under the truck is sucked up by the hoses.…

Americans throw away enough trash to fill 63,000 garbage trucks every single day. Most of the trash was used only once. Making all that stuff costs money and energy and materials. So does getting rid of it. Reusing things—even just one more time—cuts those costs. It lowers the amount of waste and pollution in the world too. Experts say it’s even better than recycling. And it can be fun, especially if you reuse your trash to make toys. Can or Piggy Bank? Ask a grownup to cut a slot in the plastic lid of a clean, empty can. Decorate the can with scrap paper or fabric and paints or markers to make a piggy bank. Milk Jug or Toss-and-Catch Game? Ask a grownup to cut off the bottom of a…

You’ve finished the last glass of milk. The plastic milk jug is empty. After a quick rinse, you put it in your recycling bin. Where does it go? If you live in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, or West Virginia, your milk jug might go to a Rumpke recycling center. 1 Rumpke’s drivers empty recycling bins into trucks nearly every day. Your milk jug is on its way! 2 At the recycling center, the truck dumps everything onto an area called the tipping floor. Do you see your milk jug? 3 Front loaders scoop up the recyclables from the floor. They pour everything into machines that empty onto two conveyor belts. 4 There’s your milk jug! It’s traveling on a conveyor belt. Workers watch everything that goes by on the belt. They…

Don’t flush used tissues down the toilet. Shredded newspaper and cardboard can be composted. But there’s a better place for large pieces. You don’t need to scrub empty cans clean, but rinsing them helps. Worms, bugs, and other tiny creatures will happily finish the bits of fruit you don’t eat. Some towns ask you to take caps off your bottles. Others let you leave them on. Paper, plastic, glass, and cans go in the recycling bin. They’ll be collected and made into new paper, plastic, glass, and cans. The average American tosses out nearly five pounds of trash a day. Some gets recycled, but most gets buried in landfills. Without proper care, landfills can pollute nearby water, land, and air. Leaves, grass, and fruit and vegetable scraps rot in a…

Carefully remove the takeout pages. Each player needs a marker to use on the game board. Buttons or dried beans work well, as long as each player has a different color, so it’s easy to tell the markers apart. Players will also need a die to throw and about 20 small pieces of trash, such as bottle caps, packing peanuts, or crumpled scraps of old paper. Each player puts a marker on the HOME space and takes one piece of trash. Place the rest of the trash on Earth in the middle of the game board. The first player rolls the die, moves his or her marker the number of squares the die shows, and adds or removes a piece of trash from Earth as directed. Then it is the…

Every year millions of tons of plastic end up in our oceans, waterways, and shorelines. It’s ugly, and worse, plastic trash can hurt animals who try to eat it or get tangled up in it. Volunteers for the Washed Ashore project work to clean local beaches. They pick up the plastic, clean it, and sort it by color and size. Then they help artists use the trash to build giant sculptures of sea animals. The statues are meant to show people how much junk litters our oceans. Plastic comes in all sorts of colors. It never needs to be dyed for any of the statues, even this colorful parrotfish. This sculpture of a humpback whale tail splashing in the ocean is about 10 feet tall. Imagine how much trash it…

Have you ever helped rake up a yard? Just a few trees can drop huge piles of leaves that fill many, many bags and bins. Imagine how many leaves fall in a forest. Who cleans up all those leaves? Nature’s recyclers collect waste and dead things that would otherwise litter the earth. They reuse the stuff or break it down into tiny bits that other living things need. Turkey vultures easily eat food that would make other animals sick. By eating rotting meat, they help keep diseases from spreading. Why don’t the vultures get sick? Special strong acids in their stomachs kill the bad parts. The vulture’s bald head helps protect it too. Messy food and germs would get stuck in feathers, but a bald head is easy to keep…