In this book, Maple Street School's Save the Planet Club decides to clean up Gilroy Park and plant some flowers to celebrate Earth Day. To raise the necessary funds to purchase plants, they hold an aluminum-can drive, with a goal of collecting 5,000 cans (which their teacher says is how many cans they need). They put the cans in bags of 10 and then 100 to keep track. They kept a tally on the wall and asked all of the school to help out and then the neighborhood. At the end, they had collected enough to buy those flowers and put on their earth day celebration. It was a great lesson in recycling as well as math with little notes on each page giving more facts about Earth Day and recycling.
The activity pages came from Primary Games so if you would like to download the activity sheet to do yourself, please feel free to check out the great site. The download is quick and easy (and best of all free)! The sheet is practicing writing the letter E and writing Earth. Great excuse to practice writing to include with a book about math and science. There was a word search which my son sometimes loves and other times makes me do most of the work. I also found a maze which he always loves! There was also a maze where you follow the letter E so that was fun!
There was another activity that I printed out just in case which was drawing things that are trash and recycling. I wasn't sure if my son was going to like to do it but it is always good to have a few things just in case.
There are also some great Earth Day coloring sheets here. I decided to go with the recycling trash can for coloring and the Recycle symbol for a collage. I was cutting coupons and had a bunch of papers so I ripped them up in little pieces and my son used his favorite tool, the glue stick, to glue the pieces inside the recycle symbol. There are a tons of different things that you can do with a plain color sheet to mix it up so that your kids aren't just coloring so make sure you use everything you have to get the most out of the activities for the kids.
I decided to work this activity into recycling the number 5 items that we had at the Whole Foods. I don't know the rules where you live in but our plastic recycling is only 1-3 and the rest are not accepted (which makes me very sad). If you have looked around, there are a ton of 5s in different plastic items including medicine bottles and butter containers. I was excited to learn that those are accepted at Whole Foods! I started keeping ours in a separate bin for the number 5s and take it when it is full and when we are going to be near the Whole Foods.
It is a great lesson for kids to understand how to divide the recycling. We have the bins in our basement including paper, plastic and others, and number 5 bin. We also have another bin of things that I would like to recycle that I don't know where to take them to like 4, 6, and 7 plastics. I hope to find somewhere or at least use them for crafts or other things around the house. I hope that this book and activities have given you ideas on how to recycle things around your house and teach your kids why it is great to recycle.
If you want to do more about recycling, there is a great website with some other recycling activities and education. Then, I found a website that had their information broken out by the age of the children so I printed some of the stuff from each of the ages which you can find here. I decided to print out lots more sheets to make sure that I had enough to go which ever direction the excitement went. I have a hard to to know what to expect from my son but I try to be prepared for anything!! Hope this gives you enough to be prepared for anything. One of his favorite activities was the adding and subtracting and putting them into the right bins. He decided to use his counters from his box from Lakeshore Learning.
If you want to go the other way and learn more about the earth, try this download from Teachers Pay Teachers. It talks about plants and how we need them. It is a great print out that provides information about oxygen and carbon dioxide process between people and trees and why we need everything to live. Make sure you check out the Science for Kids Blog for lots more fun activities.
If you are looking for more books to expand your learning, other Earth Day and recycling book ideas including the following:
The EARTH Book
The Three R's: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle (What Do You Know About? Books)
We have a dual vertical divider that I put plastic in on the top and cans on the bottom. I've taught the kids to do this. One day the top was full and I put a bottle in the bottom. My youngest was very fast to correct me. Happy he's paying attention. :)
ReplyDeleteGotta love what they pay attention to :) We have the paper bin, the plastic bin and then the special plastic bin (number 5 to go to Whole Foods) and then the stuff we are going to craft with in another whole pile. It is great to know that we are passing on our good habits to our kids!!
Delete