Earth Day Activities to Save the Earth and Still Teach Your Standards

Celebrating Earth Day in the classroom encourages kids to take steps towards taking care of the Earth. Here are four Earth Day activities to include in your eco-friendly lesson plan for upper elementary. 

Earth Day Activity 1: Read Brown Bag Journey 

Start by kicking off Earth Day by reading the wordless book, One Little Bag: An Amazing Journey by Henry Cole. In this book, your kids will see the different uses the paper bag goes through. It’s an excellent book for retelling and practicing sequence. 

If you have never used a wordless book to teach writing, this book will get you to a good start. You can use this book to start a discussion on ways your students can help the Earth. 

A reading strategy you can use to get your students to understand this book is the See, Think, Wonder.

Earth Day Activity 2: Bandages to save the Earth  

A gateway to connect reading and writing is by brainstorming all the things your young environmentalists can do to protect our environment. What better way to encourage healing the Earth with bandages. 

Don’t break the bank trying to buy some; print out the template and have kids glue it to an anchor chart.

Earth Day Activity 3: Writing to bring awareness

Next, take those Earth-saving ideas a step further with a writing prompt to instill the importance of protecting our planet. 

Writing is a staple in any upper elementary classroom. Incorporating different types of writing activity only makes your students stronger writers. 

For this activity, have your kids pick two reasons from the discussion and use the graphic organizer to explain their reasoning behind their choices. 

The graphic organizer allows your students to showcase their writing skills by incorporating ideas from the wordless book. 

Earth Day Activity 4: Brown bag Earth Day activity 

A culminating activity to celebrate Earth Day in the classroom is to recycle a brown paper bag just like in the book. 

For this earth-friendly activity, you will need a brown paper bag for each of your students, seeds or plants, and one bag of soil with perlite. We recommend using Miracle Grow. 

First, have kids decorate the brown paper bag. 

Then, place a cup of soil with perlite in the brown paper bag. 

After, place the seeds in the soil. Another alternative is to plant a sprouted plant instead of using seeds. 

Finally, plant your brown paper bag or have your students take it home.

This simple yet meaningful hands-on project is another way you can celebrate Earth Day in the classroom. 

Wrapping It Up 

There’s no better way to protect our environment than by raising awareness in the classroom. It is in the discussions and activities you have with your students that build interest in taking care of the Earth.