Earth Day is heading our way. How can you get your students to learn more about protecting the Earth?
Here are fun ways to celebrate Earth Day in the classroom.
Make an Earth Day Craft
This Earth Day Craft and activities includes a craft, map skills, reading passage with close read guide, writing a haiku template and planning page, and a parts of speech review.
Take me to the Earth Day Craft and Activities
Plant Flowers and Trees
Nothing is more beautiful in spring than bright flowers and new green growth. Choosing a class plant(s) to place on the school grounds is a great way to celebrate Earth Day. Taking care of it as it grows over the last month of school is another exciting journey, and an easy one to tie in measurement and science experiments. If you have a school where there isn’t anyone to water over the summer, just put it in a container that you can take home over the summer and bring back in the new school year.
Write poetry to celebrate Earth Day
Haikus are the perfect writing assignment for Earth Day. These short Japanese poems about nature are great for teaching syllables and word choice. Take the final drafts and add an art design for a quick wall display.
Conduct an Earth Day Science Experiment
Use this runoff experiment to teach students about littering. This is a great way to see cause and effect of not properly disposing of trash.
Sign up to grab the FREE Lab Guide for this runoff experiment.
Persuasive writing and speaking is an important standard to cover. Students also need to be willing to think about and listen to another perspective. Here are some interesting topics to use for the debate. I find it interesting to hear students talk about a topic from a different perspective.
Perform community service in the school
One of the easiest ways to do this is to have students clean up the school grounds. Gather some plastic gloves, a few trash bags, and some hand sanitizer and head out to recess a few minutes early. (I always let my administration know ahead of time so they would know why we went outside early.) Once the students have helped clean, give a little hand sanitizer and send them off to play. I am always amazed at the students who continue to ask to spend the first few minutes cleaning up the playground.
Play A Game – Make 4 Corners into a science game. As students play, tell reasons why a population might die off. Take owls for example.
– In the first round, the ones not in the corner are living in areas that are being cleared for new houses.
– In the next, there is a pollutant being ingested by the mice they eat.
– For the third round, the water the owls drink is polluted.
– In the following, an owl accidentally consumes litter.
When you are finished, have the students write a reflection on the game. What did they learn? How could they help protect the owl population? What other factors could cause the owl population to decrease? You can do another round for animals in other habitats.
Still need more ideas for Earth Day? Click HERE!
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