Earth Day

Earth Day started last week, in my classroom, with a series of activities to get my students thinking about what they could do to impact the Earth in a positive way. We started by reading our story of the week, which happen to be about Johnny Appleseed, a true conservationist who loved wildlife.  He planted apple trees for people moving west, creating a sustainable food source across the United States. Our story told of a normal man doing an extraordinary thing. He was a superhero to settlers. And it called students to think about what extraordinary thing they could do to help the Earth. My students came up with an amazing list of small but purposeful activities that they could realistically preform on a day to day basis. I took an idea from Cara over at The First Grade Parade and created this thought provoking poster with my students. It took a whole morning to get each green and blue hand print done. I had the students work on writing. At the moment, I am teaching how to do a research based All About book. The students are really into it, so it was easy to have them work on that while I called individual students. I then typed up all of the ideas that they came up with, and we placed them around the outside. Currently this poster is up in my classroom. I think that it is so beautiful that it might stay up until Open House.