Compost in a Bag Experiment

Composting is the natural breakdown of organic material. In Hamilton County approximately 50% of our residential waste is organic, but without the infrastructure for wide-spread commercial composting, most of this goes to the landfill. All around the county, people are creating their own compost piles or worm bins to convert their organic material into a rich soil amendment. To learn more about composting check out our yearly compost seminars at HamiltonCountyRecycles.org.

Don’t have the capacity to have a full compost pile? There are still ways to have your students learn about compost and explore decomposition. Today’s resource is a month-long experiment to explore decomposition from inside your classroom or home.

In this resource by Nature Bridge, students will put examples of organic and non-organic materials into a bag with soil and check on the decomposition after a month. Although the resource provides a list of items to use, feel free to add what you have available to you. For organic material, only include examples of fruit and vegetable scraps or paper products (do NOT add meat or dairy).

Here is a Composting with the FBI background reading and the Compost in a Bag lesson with PDF fillable worksheets. This lesson is geared toward grades 3-5.

Ohio Science State Content Standards 

•  3.ESS.1: Earth’s nonliving resources have specific properties.
•  3.ESS.3: Some of Earth’s resources are limited.
•  3.LS.3: Plants and animals have life cycles that are part of their adaptations for survival in their natural environments.
•  4.LS.1: Changes in an organism’s environment are sometimes beneficial to its survival and sometimes harmful.
•  5.LS.1 Organisms perform a variety of roles in an ecosystem.

Ohio Nature of Science Standards (grades 3-5)

• Scientific Inquiry, Practice and Application
  •  Use appropriate mathematics, tools and techniques to gather data and information.
  • Develop and communicate descriptions, models, explanations and predictions.
  •  Apply knowledge of science content to real-world challenges.
• Science is a way of Knowing
  •  Science is a way of knowing about the world around us based on evidence from experimentation and observations

Learn more about composting at HamiltonCountyRecycles.org.