"Putting our Trash to Work" A fourth grade recycled art project

In honor of Earth Day last spring, fourth grade students spent 9 weeks finding out where all of the materials come from that go into an art project. We discovered which resources are renewable (pencils, paper) and which are not (plastic paint bottles, cups, glue bottles, etc). Students set out to make a sculpture entirely from found and recycled materials. The only catch was that their scultpure had to have a "job."