Earth Day Celebration

Well, today we were supposed to have a tea party... but I just wasn't up to it. Hopefully next week. I might need to rethink my schedule - perhaps Tuesday would be a better day as Thursdays are at the end of the week and I quickly lose steam after Wednesday.

This particular Wednesday was a big day though as we celebrated Earth Day (did I mention that everyday should be Earth Day?). So, instead of a tea party post today, I'm filling in with a post about our Earth Day "celebration".

We started off by making flowers from recycled papers. They were easy to make and both children were able to do it. Of course, Lyssie preferred to do the paper crumbling over actually making the flowers.

Here's a quick run down of how to make them:

Materials: recycled papers (magazine pages, newspaper ads, etc. The more colorful, the better in by opinion... although black and white would still look cool), pipe cleaners (we used green) and beads (we used foam beads from the dollar store).

Cut various sized circles from the recycled papers. I did about 2 - 3 inches in diameter. Crumble the circles to give them a little texture. Then just string a few onto the end of a pipe cleaner and put a bead on the top. Bend the pipe cleaner around the bead so that it doesn't come off... and you are done!

We made a whole bouquet for Robbie to take to his teachers. Of course, he forgot them today, so they'll have to go tomorrow.

After making flowers, we moved right into planting seeds. The challenge for me is to find activities or way of adapting them so that both my children (3 year age spread) can participate. I also like to have some element of learning.

So, I labeled a muffin tin with the seed names and gave the packets for Robbie to empty requiring him to read (I put the common name, he had to read the packets to figure out each one). While Robbie was doing this, I had Lyssie filling the cups with dirt. This was a great exercise for her to perfect her fine motor skills.


I made the plant signs with colored popsicle sticks (from the dollar store) and the seed packet pictures. We planted three containers of each variety - a flowering vine, sweet peas, carrots, zucchini, basil and peppers (these seeds were from a pepper that Robbie grew last year). We used various recycled containers for our planters (water bottles, milk bottles, berry containers, etc) and we varied the way we planted them (some of them covered with no air, some of them covered with in open top, etc. This exercise was really more for experimentation than for actual producing plants... although, we'll be thrilled if any of them make it that far.

Honestly, I don't know if these will come up... but more because we don't really have a place near a window to put them. We'll see what happens. Regardless, we should learn plenty and we had fun doing it!

** I also forgot to mention that my son has blogged about this on his blog as well. Please stop by! He loves to get comments (he calls them compliments :)).