Hi friends, today I wanted to share how I teach about Earth Day and how to take care of the Earth in April!
Here are the curriculum expectations I cover and the learning goal/success criteria I introduce as we learn about Earth Day:
We start these lesson at the beginning of April, so that students have ample time to learn about why we celebrate Earth day. During lesson 1, I introduce what Earth Day, read "The Earth Book" by Todd Parr and we complete the chart "Why Do We Need To Take Care of The Earth?" together.
We also do lessons on why we should protect nature, how we can protect nature, why we should save energy, how we can reduce energy, the 3R's (reduce/reuse/recycle) and identifying items that can be recycled.
If you want to grab all 8 of my Earth Day lessons, they are included in my "Kindergarten Earth Day Activities" pack. You can click here or on the image below to check it out if you are interested!
The book I used in the lesson are:
"The Magic School Bus Gets Recycled" by Anne Capeci
(I can't seem to find a link for Chapters or Amazon for this one.. I got mine from Scholastic!)
And here are some of the centres I set out!
1. REUSE MARKERS & NEWSPAPER FOR PAINTING
We collect our dried up markers in a bin and I show them how we can put the tips in a bit of water to make watercolour paint, instead of throwing them out right away! Then, we use newspaper instead of regular paper to show how we can reuse it instead of putting it in the recycling right away!
I also cut some circles out of the newspaper and invite the students to make their own earth paintings!
2. BALLOON EARTH PAINTING
Here students are invited to use the balloon to mix and stamp an Earth on the newspaper!
3. EARTH PLAY DOUGH
To practice spelling the word "Earth" I put out these Earth play dough mats for students to create the Earth and spell the word with green and blue play dough!
4. CAN YOU MAKE THE EARTH WITH MARBLES?
Here students are invited to create a representation of the Earth with blue, green and clear flat marbles. They have the option to record their work and trace the sentence describing their work.
5. CAN YOU SORT THE RECYCLING?
I put out some recyclable items and some labelled pan and the students practice sorting the recycling based on what the items is made of. We do this after we read "The Magic School Bus Gets Recycled" and we discuss as a whole class examples of each material. The kids love this as it is so hands on!
6. BOTTLE CAP COUNTING MATS
For this centre, we reuse plastic water bottle caps as our manipulatives. Students pick a number and then find the corresponding picture and number word representation. Then they show the number on the ten frame with the water bottle caps.
7. ROLL & COVER RECYCLABLES!
Again we use water bottle caps as out manipulatives! Students are invited to roll and cover the number they roll. I made the dice out of a foam cube I bought at Dollarama and just wrote numbers on it with a flair pen. You can also draw dots or tally marks, whatever you want your kids to practice for number sense! The students can also play this as a partner game (you can provide 2 game mats or 2 different coloured bottle caps).
8. GARBAGE TRUCK NUMBER ORDER
There are always still a few kids who need practice with ordering numbers, so I made this little number order puzzle for the students to try! The number strip at the top provides extra support for the kids who need it.
BULLETIN BOARD:
Last year, we displayed our learning on our inquiry bulletin board! We also planted flowers as part of our "How Can We Protect Nature?" lesson (bottom right). We also had some Earth Day writing paper out during this unit at the writing centre, so I put some of their work up that they did there (top middle and right: "What can you do to take care of the Earth?" and "We can help the Earth by reducing the use of energy. How can you help reduce the use of energy?"
All of the printables, writing papers and centre activities you see in this post are in my "Kindergarten Earth Day Activities" pack. You can click here to read more about what's included.
I hope that gives you some ideas for teaching your Kindergarten friends all about Earth day and what we can do to help the Earth!
- Yukari
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