Our class had a very productive and exciting Earth Day this year! The goal was to provide a variety of interdisciplinary activities for the students to participate in, with the idea that Earth Day should not only be a one day celebration but something that we focus on in our every day lives. Our class created bumper stickers to raise awareness. Each student planted flower seeds which will be given as mother's day gifts in May. We also talked about their carbon footprints, using the website www.kidsfootprint.org , which is a great interactive website for kids (I used my proxima projector and did it as a whole class lesson). The students then wrote an informative essay about how they can leave a positive footprint on the Earth.
The students started a recycling center in our classroom, with bins to recycle both paper and plastic. Finally, the students participated in interdisciplinary Earth Day learning centers: math center where they had to graph data for recycling rates of various materials in the United States, reading comprehension center where they had to read a non-fiction piece about a community that recyles and then answer various questions, a science center where the students had to find the volume and mass of a cup of "polluted" water, and a technology center where the students watch a Brain Pop (www.brainpop.com) video about the three c's (conserve, clean up, chime in) and completed a graphic organizer. Those ideas were used later to create the bumper stickers.
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