In Year 5 this half term our topic is ‘Decay and Recycling’. This week, following a lesson about recycling, we decided to test out recycling our own materials. In large recycling facilities, paper is recycled by mixing paper together and to remove all the ink it is cleaned with water and soap. Once all the ink is cleaned off the paper, it is rolled out really thin and left to out to dry. It is then redistributed to be used again. It is possible to recycle paper at home in small amounts – so Year 5 have tried it!

First we ripped or cut used/scrap paper into small pieces (the smaller the better) and placed them into a large mixing bowl.

Then we added warm water. Slowly the paper began to soften. We stirred it and noticed the paper beginning to mush together. Next we added two heaped tablespoons of cornflour (traditionally used for thickening sauces in cooking) and stirred the paper until the paper softened. Usually this is where the paper/water mixture should be left to soften – but Miss Allen decided to speed up the process by using a blender!

We placed our mixture into the blender (adding more water if required) and blitzed the mixture until it became a paste.

We then spread the mixture out thinly on a sheet of foil. It is important that you do this on a hard flat surface – we used a tray.

We covered the mixture with a second sheet of foil and then placed heavy books on it to flatten it more. The books were left on top for around 4 hours until we removed them. Later, the foil was removed to allow the paper to air dry.

According to the instructions we followed, it should take around 24 hours to dry. This was not the case for our paper and it has needed around 2-3 days to fully dry.

The finished paper looks like this. It isn’t quite robust enough for us to use it in an arts and craft session but it helped us to understand the process of recycling in more depth. We used this experience to write a set of instructions – Miss Allen was pleased with the quality of our instructional writing.