Kindergarten Activities for Earth Day: Free Resources!
Your students will love these fun Earth Day activities! This set of educational activities provides students with a creative way to practice math and literacy skills all while learning about planet earth. Make sure to check out the free printables, too!
Why Should We Teach about Earth Day?
There are so many fun activities out there to get our little learners plugged into Earth Day! I love how kindergarten students are always so excited about taking care of the earth. The potential for learning that Earth day offers our young students is enormous. Let’s take a look at why Earth Day offers such a fabulous and multi-faceted learning opportunity for our primary students:
- Learning about Earth Day doesn’t have to be complicated, it can be as simple as putting a recycling bin in your class.
- Earth Day enables learners at a young age to connect with nature — take a nature walk!
- Earth Day teaches kids to think outside of themselves and start to consider the care of our earth.
- Recycling lessons can teach kids to use critical thinking skills to re-use & re-purpose old items.
- Kids learn to be good stewards of Earth’s resources, as well as their OWN resources, and not to waste them (i.e., pencils, paper, food).
- Earth Day can be a great way to get kids to look at the habitat in their areas and learn lessons about the natural world that is right outside our door.
- Earth Day is a perfect way to introduce lessons on plant life cycles, water cycle, and even a field trip to a recycling center can be a great time!
Earth Day Literacy Activities: Handwriting
We are constantly practicing our handwriting in kindergarten! We can continue working on that correct letter formation all with an Earth Day theme. These printable activities are super low prep and great ideas for morning work or even during a designated handwriting time.
Read, Trace, Glue and Draw activities are super predictable and are one of my favorite ways to practice handwriting, as well as, building sentences. The cut and glue section of this activity is perfect to work those little hands and build fine motor skills.
Similar to the activity above, this earth day activity provides students with a mixed-up sentence to cut and glue in the correct order. On each of these printables, student trace and write the sentence for additional practice.
Another fun way to work on handwriting is the use of the Make It Neat printables without the cut and glue option. I love the differentiation that is offered so you can easily use these worksheets in both kindergarten and first grade.
Let’s remember WHY it’s so important for our kindergarten students to learn, and over-learn both letter, and sentence writing, even though it seems like a simple activity:
Practice enables our students to gain fluency. And fluency in writing leads to gains in reading. Brain research supports the need for detailed instruction in handwriting and the path of motion. The results can’t be argued with…accurate handwriting practice leads to faster improvement in student reading!
You can find all of the handwriting resources here:
Earth Day Literacy Learning Games
Roll, Say, Keep is a classic favorite! Little learners have so much fun that they don’t realize how much they are learning! With these editable printables, your students can practice letter identification and sight words in engaging ways, without you spending hours prepping centers. Win-Win!
I love using this game in literacy centers. You could also use this game as a warm-up during your small group instruction or as a parent volunteer activity. This game is always a big hit with kindergarten and first grade students.
Click here to see the Roll, Say, Keep game for Earth Day:
Write the Room for Earth Day!
These Earth Day Write the Room math and literacy activities are so much fun for kids because it gets them up and moving around with their clipboards as they practice math and literacy skills related to Earth Day! The sets can be quickly edited and customized very easily so every learner has a chance to grow their skills as they progress through the different levels of activities! Earth Day math and literacy centers have never been this much fun before!
Students love this fun activity! Think scavenger hunt! You decide how hard you want students to search for the cards throughout your classroom.
You can find the write the room activities here:
Decodable Earth Day Books
We are all about decodable readers! Especially, interactive decodable readers. This set of decodable books is one of my favorite Earth Day activities because kids get to learn more about Earth Day, while growing their confidence and skills in reading at the same time!
Not only are these books great for practicing decoding but students are also working on understanding text by selecting the engaging images that match the text on each page.
Decodable books are an essential part of the Science of Reading approach to instruction. This set was written to give teachers an easy way to share the best elements of the Science of Reading in mind.
The set that has the Earth Day decodable reader also includes 4 other themed decodable books that are perfect for spring. You can check out set here:
Earth Day Poetry for Shared Reading
If you haven’t tried using poems for shared reading yet, this set of Poetry for Shared Reading – Spring and Earth Day Poems is super fun! The recycle poem is one of my favorites and is sure to get stuck in your head! Reading fluency and engagement go through the roof with these engaging poems.
We want students to love shared reading time, and when we put the poems to music, that’s when the magic happens! When students see print, hear music, and move around to the music, it stimulates multiple parts of their brains and then, exponential levels of engagement and learning take place!
We use poetry journals so students can save the individual poems and complete word work throughout the week.
You can also use the book for students.
The Earth Day Shared Reading Poetry Set can be found here.
Spring Writing Center
This Spring Writing Center was designed as a great way to set up your kindergarten writing centers for independent work that will last all year long! The writing tasks in this set are so much fun, they’ll hook even the most reluctant writers! And since the writing can be differentiated this set works well for three different grade levels…kindergarten, first and second.
The Spring-themed Writing Center is packed full of engaging low-prep activities! The options for differentiation make it easy for teachers to meet their students’ needs with very little effort. Labeling a picture, writing sentences, card making, letter writing, sequencing a story, themed word cards, portable word wall, writing center posters and more!
You can find the Spring Writing Center here:
Building Earth Day Sentences
I love the confidence that students gain when we introduce this great activity. With the sentence guides, students can build and write sentences all year long! The sentence cards in the April set are perfect for Earth Day! Here is where you can find this sentence building activity:
There is an emergent reader, too!
I hope I gave you some great ideas for your Earth Day lessons! Here are a few more engaging Earth Day resources that kids (and a kindergarten teacher!) will love:
Happy Earth Day to you and I hope you have an amazing spring with your students!
Earth Day Free Math Center
You can download a free tens and ones activity from my TPT store! Click HERE to go there now!
Earth Day Free Sight Word Activity
Be sure to snag these editable Earth Day printables for practicing sight words! Add your name and email below. Oftentimes, school firewalls will block these free files so personal emails work best!
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Deedee Wills
My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
Hi, I'm DeedeE.
My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
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4 Responses
EARTH DAY LESSON PLANS IS GREAT
Thank you for valuable suggestions
I enjoyed reading this post, especially because Earth Day is coming soon. I am a kindergarten teacher, and I think it is important to teach children about the Earth. Children are the future, and we as educators are responsible for teaching them what they need to know to protect our planet. Next week I will be teaching my children about Earth and I will use many of the ideas that you mentioned, they are amazing! Thank you for your suggestions.
I will teach my students how to create a sustainable world. It is an outstanding opportunity to focus the children’s attention, creativity and imagination on the environment. This will motivate the students to act persuasively to help solve environmental problems and give more attention to global issues.
I believe that teaching kids to love the Earth is a gentle guide to exploring the natural world with a sense of discovery and curiosity. This will help the children give extra care to our beloved planet.
I will give my students a chance to cooperate, participate, and interact to recall what they learned (Ullman, E. 2011).
During the week, I will be doing different activities that I would like to share with you:
1. I will ask students to dress up every day with a different t-shirt color:
– Yellow to present Sun
– White to present Air
– Blue to present Water
– Brown to present soil
I will take pictures of the students when they are dressed up, and I will hang the pictures in our class to remind children about what they have to do to our Environment.
2. We will sing “Plant a Little Seed.”
I will present on the smart board an online story (“How do plants grow?”).
Each one of the students will make a planting activity (growing plant from seeds). The students will take planting worksheets and they will cut/write the words and paste them next to the right part of the plant.
Thanks
To ensure the survival of our species and the world we live on, it is our duty as educators to instill in the next generation a deep appreciation for and understanding of environmental conservation. Several of the suggestions you made will be put to good use next week when I educate my kids about Earth.
Wonderful! I am so glad you found some ideas to use.