Celebrate Earth Day!

How are you going to celebrate Earth Day this year?  

We will have many talking points about recycling, pollution and our environment in my classroom on Earth Day for sure.  But my lessons on taking care of our earth doesn't just happen on Earth Day. 

On a daily basis I activity model ways to repurpose items for use in our classroom. 

 I bring in materials with the labels still on them and we brainstorm ways that the materials can be repurposed.  After the materials are used in our classroom the students see how successful the repurposing is, days later students are bringing in additional items for us to use!  You can collect a class set of anything you would need in no time.

Here are a few examples of how we all repurpose items in our classroom.

Gum containers are perfect for math manipulatives and last much longer that ziplock bags.

Who doesn't drink coffee?  These creamer containers are perfect for our Homemade Water Colors!  The spout allows for the students to pour just the right amount of watercolor for their project.  

So how many markers do you throw away during a school year?  Keep the caps!!  The caps are great math manipulatives for patterns and collecting color data.  We use them in our counting jars and the kids love them.  They also make the perfect game pieces for your board games too!

This is the coolest repurpose item we use in our classroom today.  The net bags that held our playground balls were hard to carry with little hands and after a month the bag had holes in it.   So now we arrive to recess in style.  The equipment manager is by far the favorite classroom job!

HaPpY EaRtH DaY!

Earth Day Everyday

I LoVe Earth Day!  It’s a great day to celebrate our earth and discover new ways to take care of our earth.  I take great responsibility teaching my students and fellow teachers creative ways to reduce, reuse and recycle everyday in school and at home.

On a daily basis our class recycles our plastic and paper.  We have a bin for paper/cardboard and one for plastic.  This is an easy task that everyone can participate in.   I also encourage my fellow teachers at lunch to use the recycle bins that are provided in our teacher's lounge.  It’s working and I have more and more participation!  But it doesn't stop there.  I of course also collect and melt broken crayons to make new ones, use baby wipe boxes for storage, use bottle caps and dried out marker caps in our counting jars and much, much more but my favorite thing is to repurpose.  

 Here are a few of my favorite repurpose projects that have been successful in my classroom.

You can find these large cardboard squares in any warehouse grocery store.  These make great giant game boards or maps/streets for toy cars or trains.  The possibilities are endless and they are free!!!!

We have used these for our Winter Festival for a number of years.   I have collected enough for three snowmen.  

This was the BEST idea ever!!!  Our school got some new surface computers and I just couldn't pass up these boxes.
They have lasted two years in my classroom.

Free resources are my favorite.  I created some labels for the landforms and we glued them on the map.   This was a week long project and a lot of fun!!

  I hope I have inspired you to not only 

reduce, reuse and recycle but to repurpose too!

Happy Earth Day!