Earth Day Fun and Freebies

     Welcome Back Friends! Happy Spring and Happy Earth Day! I love this time of year. There are so many fun activities to do to celebrate the excitement that Mother Earth brings to us in the spring. Today I want to tell you about a few of my very favorite activities to do for Earth Day, and to bring you a little FREEBIE to thank you for stopping by!

     My favorite Earth Day craft is a whole class, cooperative craft and it is a magazine collage of the earth. The most time consuming prep for this craft is 1. collecting old magazines and 2. cutting up any pages that have shades of blue, green, or brown into various sized squares. (Tip: Parent helpers and older students are FABULOUS for this part of the activity!)
     Next, you need to draw the earth onto a blue piece of  bulletin board paper. I shaded in the parts that were land with pencil, so that the students wouldn't get confused as they were working. Then let the kids get started gluing on the magazine squares. We usually work on our Earth throughout the entire week of Earth Day doing a little at a time. The students love that we are upcycling the magazines to make something new and beautiful, and that they get to work on a project as a whole class.

     When the project is complete, I mount it onto black bulletin board paper and put it up for display.

   
     One of the other things I love about Earth Day is all the great books there are to go along with it! Some of my very favorites are: Just A Dream by Chris Van Allsburg, Someday A Tree by Eve Bunting, Recycle Every Day by Nancy Wallace, Oil Spill  by Melvin Berger, Where Does All The Garbage Go? by Melvin Berger, and A Pig Tale by Olivia Newton John (Yes....GREASE...SANDY...Olivia Newton John).

     My favorite Earth Day activity, is to have my students go outside and read to the trees. Yep, READ TO THE TREES!!! What is better than listening to firsties read? NOTHING! So it is the perfect way to celebrate all that Mother Earth does for us. Our trees LOVE it...and I swear they stand taller every year because of it!

     
     To help your students celebrate Earth Day while they are reading to the trees, I have some Earth Day Bookmark FREEBIES for you! You can get them HERE.

    Let me know if your students read to the trees or make a magazine collage earth. I would love to hear about it. Also, what are some of your favorite Earth Day read alouds?
Have a Great Earth Day!

0

Let Creativity Bloom With Some Flower Power!

Happy Spring Friends! Even though it is SNOWING LIKE CRAZY here in Ohio right now, I wanted to share with you this really fun craft I did with my firsties! We made an adorable flower garden mural complete with paper plate flowers and wooden bead bugs! Here is how we did it:
     Materials: paper plates, tempera paint, fingerpainting paper, green construction paper, glue sticks, scissors
     Day One: I gave each child a full sized paper plate to paint yellow. ( I wanted to use small plates, but in classic "Mrs. Romo Form" I decided to do this craft on my drive to school THAT SAME DAY, and I could only scrounge up 8 small paper plates, so full sized plates it was! #unfilteredclassroom) I then had them add some orange accents to their plates so that it would look more like a center of a flower. We put those in the drying racks and then began the next step.
     I gave each child one sheet of fingerpainting paper and two different colors of paint at each table. We talked about patterns and then each child painted a pattern of their choice onto their paper. We put those in the drying racks also.

     Day Two: I returned the paper plates to the students and gave them each a precut stem and two leaves. I had them glue those onto the backs of their plates.
     I then passed back the painted pattern papers and had them cut that into long strips. (Some children felt comfortable doing this themselves and some wanted assistance. I am big on having my students do things independently as much as possible, so this was no big deal to them.)

     I then showed them how to fold the strips in half and glue the ends together and then onto the back of the plate.

They turned out absolutely FABULOUS!!!

     As an afterthought, I pulled out some wooden beads and pipecleaners and the kids fashioned some bugs to put in the flower garden. (I am sorry I don't have a picture of that process, but if you look closely in the picture below you can see their adorable bugs crawling through the garden.)
     Materials: various sized wooden beads, black pipe cleaners
     I gave each child two pipe cleaners (one uncut, and one cut into 3 pieces) and had them choose three wooden beads. We then constructed the bugs. We folded the uncut pipe cleaner in half and threaded the "abdomen" bead onto the pipe cleaner. (We turned up the folded end so the bead would not fall off.) We then put on the "thorax" bead and the "head" bead. We twisted the two ends around each other and curled the antennae down. We then added the legs by folding the 3 small pieces in half and then positioning them between the body parts and twisting them so they were secure.

 I hope I gave you a little crafting inspiration to get you into the swing of SPRING! Have you done any fun crafts for spring? I would love to hear about them!

2