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!
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