Celebrating Earth Day

As a teacher, I feel that teaching students about Earth Day is a priority.  Children need to understand the ideas of sustainable solutions, ways to help and ways to hurt our earth and why all of those things are so important to our survival.  Depending on their age, there are a variety of concepts that could be taught, from simple concepts of trees are good, garbage is bad....right up to the effects of pollution, and global warming.  

For my first and second graders, I made it a priority that they knew the importance of a few things.  1) Why do we have Earth Day?  Who created it?  When?  Why?  What are some important facts about Earth Day?  2) Ways that we, as humans, hurt our Earth.  3) Ways that we, as humans, can help our Earth.   4) The 3 R's (reduce, reuse, recycle).  

Living on St. Kitts, the 3 R's was a tough concept to help kids understand and practice as the island does not do any recycling, but we surely made the best ideas we could as to ways we can reduce and reuse to lower the amount of recyclable items we are putting into our trash!  

To show what my students knew - here is what they did!  Try to envision them printed, folded up brochure style and looking amazing! =)   The file is not very clear..Sorry!  But I was surely proud of their hard work!