Every day is Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day! My kiddos were all about it today. We started off our Earth Day activities by watching the Earth Day video on one of our favorite websites, starfall.com. It has a cute little recycling game where the kids have to clean up a forest by sorting the recycled items by paper, cans, and plastic. As the forest gets cleaner, more animals begin popping back out to return to their home! It's so cute!

After that, we read "It's Earth Day!" by Mercer Mayer.

Then we created a web of ideas for how we could help clean up the earth. My kids kept wanting to add more great ideas but we ran out of space!

We then used our ideas to create this little craftivity, "I Can Help the Earth!" The kids wrote about what they would do to help clean the Earth. Then they traced their handprint and used it to create their own little Earth and then we put it all together! The one pictured below was my absolute favorite... created by one of my super smarty-pants little girls. First of all, she labeled each part of her Earth with various labels including "Arizona", "Tucson", "Asia", "Mali", "Togo", "Madagascar", and "Pirate Island". Oh and the little island with no name? She informed me that it was a "secret unnamed state". LOL! I love kindergarten so much! I loved her writing, too: I can save electricity so I can save energy for our house and our Earth.

Here's another sample. "I will help plant trees. I will pick up garbage."

Later on in the day we watched the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle video on Brainpop Jr. - it's the free video of the week if you don't have a subscription! To cap off the day, we went out to our playground to pick up all the trash we could find. They couldn't even get over it! Every time we walked past a piece of trash in the hallway or anything, they'd gasp and say "That's not Earth Day!" and then run to pick it up and throw it away. Love that my kinders care so much!