Earth Day Activities and Books for Kids
Spring is here! What a fun time to teach our children about science in a creative, hands-on way. Whether you go on a nature walk, pick up trash at a local park, or start a garden, children can learn to care for the environment with these fun Earth Day activities and books!
Simple Earth Day Activities for Kids
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- We celebrate the beginning of spring with weekly walks around our neighborhood. We look for budding trees, nesting birds, and the arrival of daffodils and tulips in neighbors’ yards. This year, we’ll be starting a family nature journal to document all the changes we see.
- We’ll also be working in our vegetable garden in our yard. We have a raised garden bed on our back deck, right off the kitchen, which makes it easy for the kids to prune and harvest each day.
- Visiting the botanical gardens every year is a fun family field trip to celebrate the changes that spring brings!
- Now that the snow is melting, our family is excited to get back to geocaching, one of our favorite ways to explore nature near and far. We use the Geocaching app to find hidden treasures wherever our travels take us: from the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Headquarters and Visitor Center in Omaha, Nebraska to Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin to Lighthouse Ann Arbor Park in Menominee, Michigan!
- This year, we’ll also be watching our Extraordinary Earth DVD from Rachel and the Treeschoolers. You can watch a clip of it below:
Earth Day Busy Box
Our Earth Day busy box is filled with green and blue toys found around the house! You can watch the video to see what I included or scroll down for a full list:
- bristle blocks
- pegs
- pom poms and tweezers
- linking rings
- lacing buttons
- green and blue craft sticks
9 Earth Day Books for Kids
Picking up seasonal books from the library and placing them in a basket by the couch is another fun way to introduce a holiday like Earth Day to your kids! Here are some that we found at our library:
- Earth Day by Emma Carlson Berne
- Earth Day by Clara Cella
- We are Extremely Very Good Recyclers by Lauren Child
- The Adventures of a Plastic Bottle : A Story about Recycling by Alison Inches
- Our House is Round by Yolanda Kondonassis
- Katie Saves the Earth by Fran Manushkin
- Why Should I Recycle? by Susan Meredith
- Earth Day – Hooray! by Stuart J. Murphy
- The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
ow reflected on the wall from the water in a fishbowl.
, Lois Ehlert’s Planting a Rainbow is a terrific book for kids of all ages! After reading the story, you could plant flower seeds or buy an assortment of artificial flowers for your child to “plant” again and again, all year long.
Finally, if your child enjoys interactive books, be sure to check out What Makes a Rainbow? by Betty Ann Schwartz. The “magic” ribbons accumulate throughout the story, leaving a rainbow behind at the end of the book.
