Are you on the hunt for easy, yet meaningful Earth Day activities for kids? If so, you’ve come to the right place! Today I’m sharing a roundup of Earth Day books, lesson plans, center games, and no-prep activities that you and your students will love!
Why You Should Teach Students About Earth Day
First things first, what is Earth Day and why should we celebrate it with students? Earth Day is celebrated every year on April 22nd to educate and support awareness for environmental protection. The idea behind Earth Day is to promote ideas that support overall sustainability for a healthier planet. This is a great concept to introduce to children since they are the future caretakers of our planet! And in fact, they can even start helping to care for the planet today!
Teaching children the importance of sustainability, recycling, and caring for the earth is an important lesson. If no one prioritizes these things, our valuable resources will dwindle away as trash fills up our landfills! Instead, take some time to educate children about our planet and how they can be positive caretakers with simple, daily actions! In my classroom, I like to do this with thematic lesson plans, books, and fun activities in the days leading up to Earth Day. There’s a lot to cover on this topic, so taking a few days to do so helps ensure you can talk about all the important points with students!
Read Alouds for Earth Day
As we dive into this round-up of Earth Day activities, let’s start with picture books that make perfect read-alouds! I personally love using books as the basis for my lessons. They provide a wonderful opportunity for community learning in the classroom and serve as a valuable tool in teaching. I like to use books alongside homemade anchor charts, in brainstorming sessions, and encourage plenty of discussion among students after reading. This helps get the most out of each story we read, and carry it over into our lessons.
My Favorite Earth Day Books
Our Planet, There’s No Place Like Earth by Stacy McAnulty is the perfect read to kick off your Earth Day activities. In this book, students will learn amazing facts about our planet. Children will learn about climate change and how they can help keep the earth healthy for years to come.
Earth Day, Hooray by Stuart J. Murphy is a great book to show students how small steps add up to big change! Students will love listening and following along as the children in the book work hard to collect cans to raise money. They plan to use their funds to buy flowers to plant in a local park. As a bonus, this book focuses on teaching place value in a fun, realistic way as the students tally up their total cans collected!
Earth Day Everyday by Lisa Bullard will inspire students to take small actions every day to keep our planet healthy. In this story, the main character starts a club to brainstorm ways to protect the earth. She encourages all kids to be “Planet Protectors” with fun and easy ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle every day!
The Adventures of an Aluminum Can by Alison Inches is the perfect, humorous book to add to your Earth Day activities! Students will learn about where a can goes after it’s recycled and all of the interesting things it can be made into. This book illustrates recycling wonderfully for young learners.
These are just a few of my favorite books about Earth Day. Be sure to check out my full list of reading recommendations on Amazon for more inspiration!
Earth Day Videos and Songs
Do you ever use YouTube in your classroom for learning activities? There is so much valuable information available! It’s always a good idea to preview songs and videos before showing them in your classroom to ensure they are kid-friendly, but it’s well worth it for fun topics like Earth Day! I found this video to help students understand what Earth Day is. It also discusses endangered animals, recycling, how to make bird feeders, and even compost! This would be a great video to use to kick off your Earth Day lessons and introduce young learners to the topic.
This video is another fun option and features a song about Earth Day. Students will love singing and dancing along as Miss Linky sings about ways we can save the planet. If your students need to get up and move, or shake out some wiggles, a song like this is the perfect way to do so! Take a short brain break from your Earth Day activities to sing and dance as a group!
Earth Day Activities & Thematic Lessons
Once you’ve found some fun books, videos, and songs to use in your classroom, it’s time to start lesson planning! You may or may not know, but I’m a huge fan of thematic teaching. Every month, I recommend focusing on a couple of themes with students. This helps keep engagement high in the classroom and also allows you to explore new topics with your kids! Plus, it really streamlines lesson planning too since you’ll have a focus topic to align activities with! When it comes to Earth Day activities, I’ve got a lot of fun ideas inside my April Activities and Centers Resource!
This resource is jam-packed with fun activities for the month of April. Aside from the Earth Day activities, you’ll also find plenty of lessons to go along with other spring themes as well. But for today, let’s focus on all things Earth Day inside this unit! Some of the fun activities for learning about Earth Day include:
- Earth Day Vocabulary Word Tracing
- Trash Bag Math Measuring Center
- Recycling By Material Game
- Read and Write the Room
- Earth Day Writing Prompts
- Earth Day Feeling Matching Puzzles
- Earth Day Non-Fiction Readers and more!
There’s a little something for everyone in this unit! From writing activities to math games to vocabulary, there are a lot of fun Earth Day activities that you can use with your students. My favorite activity in this unit for sure though, is the fun writing craft! With this craft, students will follow the step-by-step directions to make a super cute planet Earth! Then, they will fill out the included writing prompts to record important things they learned about Earth Day. This is the perfect way to finish up your Earth Day lessons at the end of the week!
A Peek into this Unit
Want a little peek into these Earth Day activities? I pulled out a fun and interactive Earth Day Write the Room center that you can try out for free. To get your free Earth Day activity just fill out this form. That’s it! The center activity will appear in your inbox in no time. Trying out the activity is a great way for you to experience first hand the types of activities you will find in the unit. So what are you waiting for? Head over and grab your Free Earth Day Write the Room Center!
No-Prep Earth Day Activities
I think it’s probably safe to say that as teachers, it always seems like we’re short on time. This is why I often lean into low-prep and no-prep activities like color-by-code. Color by Code pages offer a way to practice important skills such as letters, numbers, number sense, and sight words in a way that feels fun and relaxed to students. I love turning on some calming music and encouraging students to work through a color by code page in the afternoon. This is especially nice after recess when students need a few minutes to calm their minds and shift gears back to learning!
For my Earth Day lessons, I like to use the printable activities in this bundle. it includes print-and-go options for practicing letter recognition, number identification, number sense skills, and primer and pre-primer sight words. I love that these print-and-go options save time and make it easy to differentiate by skill level among students.
If you’re hoping to target different skills with these activities, you’re in luck! All of the resources in this bundle are fully editable! This means you can quickly and easily fill each page with the desired skill or concept you’re working on. Choose different sight words, add vocabulary words, spelling words, math facts, and more! The options are endless and they only take a minute to edit accordingly. You’ll love having this low-prep option available for your Earth Day activities!
Try These Earth Day Activities!
Which of these ideas sounds the most fun to you? I hope you found something new to try with your students as you prepare to celebrate Earth Day! You can find all of these resources mentioned here and many more in my TPT Shop. I hope you have fun planning your own Earth Day activities for learning!
Save These Earth Day Activities & Ideas
This post is packed with all of my favorite activities for celebrating Earth Day with students. Pin it on Pinterest so you’ll have all of these ideas in one place!
