Earth Day has always been one of my favorite events to celebrate with my school babies. There's just something about it. I love the sense of camaraderie we gain through our teamwork as we clean up trash around the school grounds, pay more attention to our recycling efforts, and love our Earth just a little more than we already do.
As usual, this time of the year seems to speed by quickly and these events sort of pop up without giving us much time to plan or prep. I mean, it's not like we have a MILLION other things going on, right?! HA!!! I thought this would be great time to remind us of some fun Earth Day activities for our primary babies and help you {maybe} try to plan ahead this year!!!
I always like to stock my library with lots and lots of Earth Day friendly books around this time of the year. I put them out a couple of weeks ahead of time so that the kids can do their own perusing. When we start our thematic unit of study, I'll read several of them aloud. I like that the kids are familiar with them prior to reading. These are some of my favorite Earth Day books...
After we read a few of these books, we make our anchor charts. Things that help the Earth and things that harm the Earth. These stay up in the room as a visual for a few weeks after Earth Day. The kids love using them as a reference for their writing.
Remember what I said about the camaraderie and cooperation earlier?! This is one of those group projects we displayed in the hallway and absolutely LOVED putting together!!!! We brainstormed lots of different ways we could help the Earth first and then I typed them out and we reviewed what we said as we splashed them on the display. Then the kids painted their hands blue and green and added their handprints to the "Earth". I loved this!
This is another litte writing craftivity I love to incorporate into our learning. I think I've been doing this one since the first year I started teaching! I'm shocked I'm not tired of it yet! Really, I love anything with their sweet handprints!!!
Earth Day is a great time to reinforce and/or introduce the concept of cause & effect. We reinforced this skill using this freebie. It was a great way for me to assess not only my kid's understanding of cause and effect, but it also gave me a glimpse into their understanding about what we learned about Earth Day.
We love singing this song, too! Each of my kids gets a copy of this song for their poetry folders and then I print it out on sentence strips for our poetry center as well. My kids have access to this song/poem for a couple of weeks....manipulating the words, one-to-one correspondence, tracking print, rhyming, fluency, etc. This is in my What a Wonderful World Earth Day packet, but you can grab it for free here. Just click on the pic.
I mentioned my What a Wonderful World Earth Day packet and here are a few activities we do from using this resource.
My kids loved "tossing the trash" in their word work center!! I just printed off the real/nonsense word cards and sorting labels and then crumpled them all up and placed them in a container. THe kids have to uncrumple (is that even a word???) the word cards and determine which words are real and which are nonsense and then sort accordingly. I let them toss the trash into the corresponding bins and they thought this was a hoot!
I think my favorite addition to my classroom this time of the year is my little Compost Critter. We talk about the idea of composting and learn all about what it is and how to do it and then we create this little critter who will show us how compost is made. It's a pretty cool process. It takes a while for the material to turn into compost, but the kids love being able to observe the changes. Once it's all ready, we use the compost to plant our plants :) The kids LOVE this!!!!
I found the book, I Can Save the Earth, a few years back and use that as a springboard for this writing craftivity.
We also have a "GREEN DAY" as a culminating activity to our learning. We actually have our Green Day ON Earth Day and this is a perfect way to tie in all of our learning and have loads of fun at the same time. I send home a parent note requesting different items and for the entire day my kids are engaged in fun, hands-on (academic!!!) Earth Day activities. I can't imagine doing it a different way now!! All the details are in my Earth Day packet....along with family homework, too!
For this week only, you can grab this resource on sale!
WAS $10
THIS WEEK ONLY (week of 4/11/16): $6
I've also collaborated with Abby from The Inspired Apple to bring you four weeks work of cross curricular lesson plans chock full of science experiments and math/ela extension activities. The Science of April includes a week-long Earth day study full of science notebook activities, experiments, vocabulary lessons, and math/ela extensions. These two resources compliment each other beautifully and would be great for making learning about Earth Day fun and meaningful!
Here's a peek....
You can grab it here:
These are two of my favorite Earth Day experiments. They're perfect for our primary kids and really help to bring these concepts to life!
My favorite thing about Earth Day is hearing what my own two boys have to say about it when they get home from school that day. Last year they became SO very conscientious about recycling and conserving water. My oldest came home and told me he was DONE with baths!!! "Mom..baths use SO many gallons of water. I'm a big boy...I can totally take showers instead from now on!"
I about died.
And let me tell you what. That's all both boys take anymore....showers. Every now and again I'll suggest a bubble bath...because, FUN....and they insist that's too much wasted water. I really hope they're always this mindful of different things when they get older!!!
Conserving energy however is totally different struggle ;)
Now let's take care of a little business.
If you own my Write the Room yearlong bundle, please make sure you download the April edition as it's been added to the pack. May is coming soon, so be on the lookout!!!
And if you're right in the middle of teaching and reviewing r-controlled vowels like we are, then here's a little something for your files. These R-Conrolled Vowel Flip Strips are perfect for reviewing and reinforcing these spelling patterns!!!
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