Earth Day

Happy Earth Week! We've been talking about taking care of the earth for three days now, and we've really covered a lot. On Monday, we read this book on the Promethean board:

You can check it out on wegivebooks.org. It is extremely informative in a developmentally appropriate way. Then we made these flip books that are great for practicing cause and effect.

 We also worked on these cute little Earth people that are now hanging in the hallway. 

 Here's what they look like with a closed shirt:

And here's an example of what we wrote on the inside.  Each student wrote a realistic, achievable promise to the earth. 

Today, we sorted a huge bag of recycling after reading this book:

(If your child came home announcing that you need to start putting your underwear in the freezer as a method of staying cool in the summer, it's because this book jokingly suggested it. Underwear freezing aside, it does have some great tips that kids can use to save Earth's resources.)

Then we sorted these cards according to whether they would make the earth happy or sad. 

Here's the huge bag of recycling we sorted:

On a rather comical note, this is a picture from our religion lesson on Monday. Our story this week is about Jesus visiting Mary and Martha.  Because I always like for the kids to have a visual while they are learning the story, I decided to have them help me draw Mary and Martha.  I drew stick figures with no faces, and each child got to come up and add something to the people as we were discussing the story's events. We talked about what their expressions might have been, what they might have been wearing, what they might have been holding, etc. This is what we got!

As you can see, Martha is clearly holding some food that she would have served to Jesus, but she is not very pleased that her sister is happily listening at Jesus' feet.  

The kids all took the story and its message very seriously, but I just think the picture we made is kind of funny! :)