Earth Day

I wasn't really planning on doing anything for Earth Day this year, but we have a giant container of broken crayons that no one ever touches and I have thought about repurposing some of them for quite a while now.  Reagan, Kate and I found some green and blue crayons, peeled the paper off (there was a lot of grumbling about this task), and added the pieces to our craft muffin pan.  Reagan threw in a few white pieces too.

I put the pan in a 300 degree oven for about 15 minutes (until they were fully melted, but no longer), and then let them cool on the counter.

Kate likes to eat frozen blueberries.  You can see blueberry juice all over her arms, face, and fingernails.

Maybe our earth crayons will get some use!

Kite Day

C and R were invited to Auntie Cyn's house recently for a special day.  They love Auntie Cyn (my husband's aunt) and they were super excited to spend the day with her and Uncle George.

It was Earth Day, so they made their own kites out of shopping bags!  How cool is that?  They even went to the park to fly them; C and R were happy to report that the kites flew really well. 

After flying the kites, they worked together to write a book about their day.  This is one of the illustrations C drew for the book.  Auntie Cyn and Uncle George had a bird kite hung up in the window over the kitchen table and C decided to draw a picture of them eating lunch with the kite in the window.

The directions they used to make the kites came from my-best-kite.com where you can find many different types of kites to make.

Just in case you were wondering what I was doing while they had all this fun, I was shopping for maternity clothes!

C and R had a wonderful time.  Thank you, Auntie Cyn and Uncle George!

Happy Earth Day

We are playing in the dirt today.  What are you doing?  Join us for the Great Outdoor Challenge hosted by 5 Orange Potatoes.

Earth Cupcakes

This is the end of the freezer stash of cupcakes.  I took them out and mixed up a little blue and a little green frosting.  I frosted them with the blue first and then just added a few dabs of green.  The kids were happy!  They liked taking a bite out of the earth.

Hand print Earth

We are reading a few of our favorite books about our wonderful planet this week:

• What a Wonderful World by George David Weiss and Bob Thiele
• Fancy Nancy, Every Day is Earth Day by Jane O'Connor
• Earth Helpers Count the Ways to Save our Planet!  by Alyson A. Zachary
• Michael Recycle by Ellie Bethel

C and R both knew a few ways to take care of our planet.  I was impressed.

We took our paints outside to make hand print earths.  I traced a large bowl onto some paper that was used to wrap a shirt that we recently purchased.  I made a point to mention to C and R that we were recycling this paper!  I cut out the circles and they painted them blue.

Once the blue paint dried, I painted their hands green (C was a willing participant - I was shocked!  I think he participated only because green hands are monster hands.)

and they made hand prints on the blue circles to look like earth.

  Happy Earth Week!
I am linking this to stArt.  Go visit A Mommy's Adventures to see more great book projects!

    

Earth Day

This Thursday is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.  We plan on doing at least one activity in honor of Earth Day this week.  Today, however, is Patriot's Day in Massachusetts and we are enjoying a relaxing day at home watching the Boston Marathon.  It is also school vacation week here so I might not be entering the blogosphere too much this week - we'll see.

Anyway, I thought I would leave you with our Earth Day activities from last year.  For complete directions for each craft, click on the highlighted text before each photo.

We made earth mosaics with play doh:

 

 We made puppets with recyclables:




and we made earth with coffee filters:

Have a wonderful week! 

Open ended art - Earth mosaic

We participated in the open ended art project at Growing and Learning by Leaps and Bounds this week. The project is a clay/play doh mosaic. After looking through our play doh drawer, and discovering a plethora of blue and green, I decided that C and R could make Earth mosaics. I cut out circles from cereal boxes, but everything else was done by C and R.


I gave C and R blue and green play doh and they cut the play doh into small pieces.

Then, they placed the pieces where they wanted them on the cardboard circles.




The finished product. They both thought it was funny to hold the planet Earth in their hands.


Finally, we placed them on black construction paper just for the effect of being in space.

This is C's project.

This is R's project.

We also read two books to go along with this project: Me and My Place in Space by Joan Sweeney and Looking Down by Steve Jenkins. Me and My Place in Space is a great introduction to our solar system. Looking Down is a wordless picture book with cut-paper illustrations that depict the many levels of the universe. R was not really interested in the books, but C enjoyed both of them.

Visit Shannon at Growing and Learning by Leaps and Bounds to see more artwork.

Recycled puppet craft

This is an easy way to use some of your recyclables on Earth Day.

1. Cut out eyes, a nose, and a mouth from old magazines. Just find any page that has colors that appeal to you and cut them in the shapes of eyes, a nose, a mouth, and you can even do eyebrows.

2. Glue them on to the front of a paper lunch bag. C insisted on gluing his on the top (flap) of his paper bag; that was fine. As long as they are having fun, right?

3. Stuff the paper bag with shredded newspaper. Stuff a lot in there to hold the shape.

4. Put a paper towel roll in the bag.

5. Wrap a rubber band around the bag and paper towel roll to make a handle for your puppet.

6. Glue some yarn or ribbon scraps on the top for hair.

7. Make a few and have a puppet show!

There are so many ways you can decorate these and it is a good way to reuse some of the scraps and recyclables in your home.

Earth Day reading

We try to do our part to keep our planet healthy every day but this week we are talking about why we recycle, reuse, and reduce as much as possible in celebration of Earth Day. We are enjoying these great books:

What a Wonderful World

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

Diary of a Worm by Doreen Cronin

The Three Rs: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle by Nuria Roca

Michael Recycle by Ellie Bethel

Wonder Pets Save the Tree

I had every intention of making a trip to the library for more books, but we have four little infected ears that have kept us home the past few days. Hopefully, we will make it to the library for the special Earth Day story hour on Wednesday!

Earth Day craft

To celebrate our beautiful planet, we did a coffee filter craft. C and R had fun with this simple project.

First, flatten a coffee filter and color it with blue and green washable markers. Don't color the entire surface, just scribble across the filter. Also, try to avoid coloring too much in one spot because the filter will tear. Then, using a spray bottle, lightly spray the coffee filter. I let C and R spray the filters 3 or 4 times. If you spray too much, the filter will take forever to dry and will probably fall apart.

C and R loved the spray bottles I bought for them at the dollar store.

The colors will spread and blend together.

Glue the dry Earth onto a black piece of paper and use a white crayon to make stars in space.

The final product is neat and really does look like Earth in space.