Today we made our plastic turtle.  It doesn’t have a name, but it shows what really happens to a turtle when it eats plastic. Most of the time they eat fish and jellyfish, but if the come across a plastic bag and eat it by mistake, they could die.

This is how we made our plastic turtle. First we looked at the materials we had. We had gathered all kinds of plastic from the beach and had them stored in feed bags. After looking through them we started looking a bit closer at everything. The bits of plastic were all different. There was string, plastic bottles, and bits and pieces of different kinds of plastic of all different sizes.

Then we were chatting together to see what animal we were going to make from the plastic. We decided on a turtle. We found some of the possible bits we needed and washed and dried them. We started weaving bits of string onto a grid and we made a head out of foam. More and more bits were added to the grid. Tadhgan had found a screwdriver and a bit of wood and started screwing holes into bottle tops. With all the string we had found we made the outline of a turtle shell. We started stringing bottle tops and plastic of all sizes into all the bits of string. We had now made the turtle shell.

I had found a plant pot and a piece of string with a knot in the end and I made it into a tail. I got a sheet of carpet stuff and cut it out into front flippers. It was very droopy, so we had to get two poles to give it balance. We sewed the head on and found some plastic to make back flippers. We had finished our plastic turtle.

I was very pleased with the finished turtle and what we had made with the materials we had. I was very surprised by how good it worked out. Our plastic turtle shows what could be inside a turtle if we throw away plastic.

I learnt, we have to be careful with plastic. If you find plastic, put it in your pocket and put it in a bin and use the three Rs. These are recycle, reuse and reduce. This will help the animals.

I would like to say a special thank you to Amanda who helped this all happen.

By Maggie, P5