Members of Maple Street Save-the-Planet Club are cleaning up Gilroy Park when Ryan has a brainstorm: Instead of throwing aluminum cans in the garbage, why not bring them to the Recycling Center and use the money to buy flowers to decorate the park for Earth Day? Mrs. Watson, the club's advisor, figures out that they're going to need 5,000 cans, so the kids start a big collection campaign at school. Cans are grouped in bags of 10, 100 and 1,000. Recycling facts are sprinkled throughout the illustrations. 

Understanding place value is key to working easily with large numbers. 

Illustrated by Renée Adriani.
Do you collect cans and recycle paper and plastic bags at your school?  

Some Facts About Aluminum Cans: 

  • Recyclers pay $800,000,000 for cans to recycle each year, but nearly a billion dollars-worth still end up in landfills. 
  • Recycling aluminum takes just 5% of the energy needed to refine aluminum from ore.  Aluminum can be recycled over and over, too!
  • Nearly 75 percent of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today.
  • More than 100,000 aluminum cans are recycled in the US every minute.
  • It takes 60 days for a can to go from store to home to recyclerto a new can!

Let’s all do our part and make every day Earth Day. Hooray!
  • As you read the story with your child (or students), point out how the cans are bundled together in groups of 10s, 100s, and 1,000s. Discuss how 10 ones equal 10, 10 tens equal 100, and 10 hundreds equal 1,000.

  • Discuss with your child (or students) items that can recycled, such as newspapers or cans. Set a goal for the number of items to recycle, perhaps 100 newspapers or 1,000 cans. Have the children keep track of the number collected and how many items are still needed to meet the goal.

  • Teacher Idea: "Earth Day- Hooray!" was an April selection for our PTA-funded “Book-of-the-Month” program. Every teacher, K – 5, as well as all the intervention specialists, was given a copy of the book, along with an activities packet with suggestions for how to use the book to develop Reading, Writing, and Math skills. Earth Day, of course, is April 22, but April is “Mathematics Awareness” month, too, so the book was a perfect choice. One activity was having kids take up a collection of recyclable cans, just like the kids in the story. Could they predict how long it would take for their collection to grow to 100 cans to 1,000? From a 1,000 to 10,000? --Mary Wheeler, literacy coach, Bunker Hill Elementary School,    Houston, TX