Lesson video

Hello, so today we are going to look at what's in your wardrobe, and I'm going to help you write a written report.

In today's lesson, you will need some lined paper and a pencil.

You also need to make sure that you're somewhere where you can concentrate nice and quiet, and you can hear my voice.

Okay, you ready? Let's get started.

We've already done our intro quiz, so what else will we be doing today? Keywords and topics.

We're going to do a little bit of research, or rather you're going to do a little bit of research.

We're going to then put together this written report, and I'm going to help you at each stage so you feel happy about what we're doing.

Let's look at today's keywords, and these are words that are going to appear throughout today's lessons.

And they're also words that I want you to start to become comfortable with, so that when you're doing your writing, you could be using these words like a professional.

Okay, ready? Let's have a look at them.

Microfibers, these are very thin plastic-based, so they're synthetic threads that are thinner than a human hair.

Greenhouse gases, you hear that word quite a lot, but do you actually know what it means? These are gases that get caught in the atmosphere.

They get trapped and what they do is because they're there, the sun comes in and it can't escape, so it bounces back down and it causes the earth to warm up.

And we're going to be touching on how we're contributing to these greenhouse gases.

And the last word for today.

Environmental impact, that is the result of our negative actions on the environment.

Here we see those six terms: Water contamination, water pollution.

I've put them together.

Soil erosion, microfibers in our ocean.

Do you remember what microfibers were? Were they natural or synthetic? Good, they were synthetic.

And were they big, big fibres or tiny, tiny fibres? Yeah, you've got it, they were tiny fibres.

So they're very small synthetic fibres that are in our ocean.

Washing clothes and clothing sent to landfill.

And you remember landfill is big dug-out areas, but clothing and other rubbish that can't biodegrade, piled high.

So we've got our six environmental impacts there.

What I would like you to do now is to pause the video and write those out, because we're going to start to think of some solutions.

So pause the video.

Make sure you get your spellings right, very important, and press play again when you've written those down.

Well done.

Fantastic.

So, water contamination and water pollution.

I want you to think about how we could reduce that impact.

How could we stop contaminating drinking water or polluting it? What do you think? Think about how that pollution gets there in the first place.

Okay, well this is my solution, which might not be the same as yours, but let's look together.

Industry, so as the manufacturers to grow crops without using pesticides.

Better systems for filtering drinking water.

So there's two ideas there.

Firstly, the farmers would use less or would use no pesticides, and they want to use pesticides 'cause they're gettin' most out of their crop, but encourage them not to do that, but also to make sure that drinking water for people is better filtered so that if chemicals do get in, we can protect people's health.

Okay, soil erosion, let's look at that together.

And we know what soil erosion is.

It's when that soil is wasted away from over farming.

what could we do to stop that? Okay, got a thought? Less intensive farming and resting fields.

When my family, they are farmers, when they were using crops, and the farmers who live near where I am, they rotate their field, so they might rotate the crops so that they let a field rest.

So they did that less intensive.

They might, they will be able to stop the goodness, the top piece of that soil washing away.

Okay, so let's look at microfibers in our oceans.

We know what that is.

It's synthetic, very small fibres that are getting into our oceans.

Now how could we stop that? What do you think? I bet you've got loads of ideas for this one.

Don't be fooled by that word, microfibers.

Okay, let's look together.

We do see amount of landfill waste produced, yeah, fantastic.

So, it's getting into the oceans because it's been dumped, and it's not being looked after.

So we need to stop doing that.

Maybe we could be a part of that is by reusing, or not throwing away so much, or not buying so many products, and they might be some of the solutions you had.

Washing clothes.

I don't think the solution, well we'll see, I'll be quiet.

What do you think? How can we reduce our environmental impact that we create by washing so many clothes have a look.

Oh, okay.

Use eco settings.

So that's settings that use less water or lower temperature and only wash when necessary.

Well, I was going to say, don't wash your clothes.

That's not a good thing but maybe just cause you've worn that t-shirt once, maybe you could wear it again.

Okay so have a look, think about that.

And clothing sent to landfill.

How could we stop sending so many pieces of clothing to landfill do you think? Well, I put recycled clothing and only buy what we need.

I've got you to do a lot of thinking there.

What I would like you to do now is to write the notes the solutions next to your environmental impacts that you previously wrote.

You're going to need these notes for our next task.

Right, we're now going to do our written report, but don't worry, I'm going to do it with you.

Okay, we're going to divide it into three areas.

The first thing I would like you to do is add your title to the top of your page and underline it.

Make sure it really is at the top.

You might want to pause between tasks now to make sure that you get things lovely and neat.

Make sure that word environmental is also written and spelled correctly.

The next thing we're going do is we're going to choose three of those environmental issues of the list you've just written out and we're going to write them out in a full sentence.

Now this is quite a skill.

So I'm going to give you an example of a first one that I would choose which would be soil erosion.

So this whole paragraphs are going to go straight underneath the title.

When farmers overworked soil by growing cotton they can cause soil erosion.

So the first sentence I'm putting in is how sort of erosion happens.

And here comes my solution.

So what happened and solution, if farmers rotate or rest fields, they can reduce the chance of soil being washed away.

You might find that what you would like to do is to copy down this first one to help you out.

Can you, before you do what I would like you to probably do now, is just to pause the video now and make sure you've got that title down.

And if you want to, copy down that first paragraph and then I'm going to make sure you're okay before you start out on this top first task.

Okay, so I've put this slide up because it's quite involved, but it's really going to help you.

so you can see the soil erosion one.

And I gave the example.

That's what I've given you here on this side.

So you can either use soil erosion or you can use three others and I'd like you to write three.

So what is it? What are microfibers in our ocean for example might do? And then what the solution is.

And I want you to write it as a lovely paragraph.

This is our first paragraph.

I know you can do this, go for it.

And now am going to do some primary research.

And primary research is research we do ourselves.

We are going to have a little look at what happens, how often we use our clothing.

I've got this great statistic here.

The average household in the UK has about 4,000 pounds worth of clothing in their home.

But 30% of it hasn't been worn for at least a year.

And the biggest reason for this is that it doesn't fit.

Okay, you ready for your task? Let's go for it.

I want you to go into your wardrobe or your drawers at home.

And I want you to divide your clothing up into clothing that you wear weekly, monthly and those that you haven't worn for over a year.

You might find that you want to divide these with stickers or some post-it notes or something like that.

Or have a little look.

And then I want you to look at the fabrics that these clothes are made from.

Are they natural? Are they synthetic? Are they blended? Are they polyester and cotton? Have a little look.

Is there a pattern? And then I want you to think what happens to your clothes when you're finished with them, do they go to landfill? Do you pass them on? Are they recycled? What, what sort of thing do you use them for? So pause the video now, go and work out how many clothes you wear weekly, monthly and hardly wear at all.

Look at those materials and think about what happens to your clothes.

Okay, How did you get on with your research task? We're going to go back to our written report now.

So we've already put in our environmental issues and our solutions.

So there's three lovely paragraph or there's three lovely sentences about some of the environmental issues from our table.

Now what we're going to do is we're going to add in your findings and we're going to do that in full sentences.

So for example, I have put a sentence starter to help you out.

in my wardrobe, I often wear 10 out of the 12 pieces of clothing.

Okay, you might have more bits of clothing or you might wear all of them.

My clothing was made from? What materials were your clothes mainly made from? It'd be really lovely if in here you could add some examples of the different types of clothing and what materials they were made from.

When I am finished with my clothing what do you generally do with it? You might need to ask an adult to help you this.

Pause the video now.

And I would like you, to add to the findings of your research.

Okay, So that's the research section done.

Wow, we've done two sections already.

So we've put the facts in at the top.

We've put in our research and now we want to see what can we do to make that impact? What can we do to move forward, to help the environment? And this time we're going to do a little bit of secondary research.

I'm going to give you some of the solutions.

Let's do that research.

And this look I'm giving you that secondary research researchers is done for you.

How can we reduce our environmental impact? Okay, so washing your clothes on an eco cycle we've already sort of talked about this but what's important here is that we have that lower temperature and reducing the amount of energy, electrical energy and the amount of water we're actually using.

Do you remember that fact about washing clothes? Try to resist buying fur fast fashion pieces.

Remember they are high fashion, but low quality.

And so they have a very short lifespan.

Try and choose clothes that are long lasting and consider maybe buying secondhand clothes, vintage or having clothes donated.

Repair fix your clothes quite often on a pair of jeans you'll will have a little cotton tag and on it will be so non a spare buttons that you can use maybe patch up any holes you have in your clothes.

Keep those, make those clothes more longer lasting.

Maybe you can even use your clothes in a different way so you don't have to send them to landfill.

You can pass them on or don't donate them maybe clothes that were really good going out tops, can be used at home for when you're gardening or just messing about.

So the next step, what I would like you to do next is to, we're going to add to the bottom of our written report.

So I'm looking for you to now make links to what you found in the middle, what your traits are to what our solutions might be.

And this section is going to be called reducing your environmental impact.

I've given you an example of a sentence here which I'm hoping will help you.

I mainly throw my clothes away when I don't want them.

I need to consider recycling or donating to charity.

Go back and look at this slide again.

And now pause the video and fill in the final part of your written report.

Well done, today's been really super tricky.

I think writing written reports is really hard.

I hope that the sentence starters and structures really helped you and when you're writing or doing extended writing at school in the future think about using facts very clearly reflecting on those in your own situation and then putting forward solutions.

I'm really impressed with the way that you guys have looked at the notes as well.

And really making sure that in your work you're using our keywords all the time.

Well done today.

A really tricky lesson I'll look forward to seeing you soon.