How can you celebrate Earth Day in your classroom? Get students to plants seeds, create your own recycled paper, and see how solar power is used in everyday gadgets. Earth Day picture books are helpful for teaching students about recycling and saving the Earth. Teachers can also use Earth Day tokens as classroom rewards. See more of these ideas for having some Eco-Friendly Classroom Fun for Earth Day below.

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• Get students to plant seeds: Do you know about seed paper? It’s recycled paper with tiny embedded seeds. When the paper is planted, so are the seeds. Students can do this as an experiment, planting them in recycled milk boxes or used plastic bottles that have been cut open. Seed paper in general comes in different forms: gift cards, celebration tokens, even business cards. The hope is that one day, all paper litter could help the environment rather than harm the environment if they were made from seed paper. This one on the right is the Earth Day themed seed paper.

• DIY Recycled Paper: An easy project is for students to make their own recycled paper by mixing bits of old paper, dried flowers and tissue, soaking the mixture, blending it to a pulp, (dye can be added), then rolling it out onto a flat sieve and leaving it to dry. The dried flowers gives it a bit of color and plant texture.  After making their own paper, your students can use them to make Earth Day cards or posters. They can also make recycled newspaper beads for an Earth Day bracelet. By using less tree based material in your classroom, students can save a tree. Speaking of recycled newspaper, there are pencils made from recycled newspaper!  Did you know that the newspaper protects the graphite better than wood pencils? You can read more about these here and here.

• Earth Day Classroom Rewards: Use inexpensive, earth day themed, and very useful everyday tools that students always need like pencils and erasers, etc. Most of all, students like to have a little incentive to stay on track and behave well. Again, the recycled paper pencils would make great tokens (these on the right are peppermint scented). Earth Day candy is also good idea. They make for great reward tokens.

• Solar Power in the Classroom: Don’t use batteries if you don’t have to! Solar power is clean energy. Just for Earth Day, your students can see how a solar phone charger can power the classroom kindles or tablets. Solar chargers are meant for emergency use and not to be used everyday but they can be used for phones and other devices with the USB port. Now for some old school technology… calculators.  Most student calculators are now solar powered – these can be large and colorful for younger students or pocket sized and as sleek as a credit card for teens. You may already have these in your class and students like to see the numbers fade away then reappear by covering the solar area with their hands.

• Students can design their own reusable produce bags: Give your students some plain canvas tote bags and some markers for them to turn them into reusable produce bags. They can create unique Earth Day themed designs on the bags.

• Have Earth Day picture books for your classroom.

• Make an Earth Day Bulletin Board with your students: A positive message about changing the world together is suitable for an Earth Day bulletin board. This bulletin board reads ‘We are Leaders, Explorers, Thinkers, and Peacemakers, and Together We Can Change the World’.

Have a great teaching week!