Saving Our Earth

Did you manage to work some sort of recognition of Earth Day into your lessons this year? I'm late with my post, but it is never too late to teach our little ones about living green.

Here are a few basic things we can do that will make a big difference:

• Turn off the lights when we leave a room.
• Take a walk in your neighborhood park with the intention of picking up trash. Plan ahead, take gloves and two trash bags. One bag is for trash and one bag is for recycle. Time yourself as to how long you will pick up trash or plan to pick up a certain number of items to throw away or recycle.
• Start a compost pile for your vegetable scraps. Here are directions for a worm bin. Its a fun project involving dirt and worms. What child wouldn't love that!
• Recycle. If your city doesn't have a recycling program at least recycle your aluminum cans and newspapers. For a larger scale project, plan on organizing a recycling program.
• Turn off the water as you are brushing your teeth.
• Teach respect of life. We can go out and shoot photos or draw pictures of butterflies and bugs. There is no need to catch them and put them into collections.

Teaching respect of our earth is an important lesson and so easy to work into everyday lessons and unit studies.