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By Catherine M. Pruissen

Earth Day
22 April, 2002.

Each year millions of young people participate in Earth Day around the world. As you'll see by the following, the activities that teach children the value of our wonderful earth are endless.

• Talk with the children about how much and what kind of energy, paper, and cleaning supplies are used at your child care or home? How much water is used?
  How much garbage, and what type of waste, is generated? Look for ways to reduce these.
• Invite a speaker to come and talk about environmental issues.
• Adopt a local park, stream or beach, and clean it up. Or organize a cleanup day near your facility.
• Set up an organic garden at your daycare. Don't forget to start
  a compost pile for biodegradable garbage. When it turns to compost, use it in the garden.
• Create a community green map. Highlight all of the environmental assets in your community (such as parks, recycling centers, farmers' markets, public transit stations, etc.).

• Start fast-growing plants (maybe radishes) in pots with different soils such as sand, clay, compost, earth, etc.
• Having the children's relish in kneading and handling soil.
• Take the children on a study trip to a recycling plant to learn more about the importance of recycling. This will also give them a chance to see the process by which it is done.
• Teach the children about water pollution. Have them make their own pollution with an old black marker, two glasses of water, two stalks of celery. Take the tip out of black marker - place into one of the glasses of water. Place a stalk of celery in each glass. Observe.
• Children can see the effects of air pollution by reusing materials such as milk cartons, cut out in different shapes such as butterflies, birds, flowers, etc. Punch hole in and tie yarn on end of each shape. Have the children rub Vaseline on the cutouts, then take them outside and hang on tree or fence. Check the cutouts each day to observe how dirty they get. Read stories about the causes of air pollution.
• Cut out a circle of blue construction paper to represent water. Paint the children's hands green and let them put their hand prints on top of the water to represent land. Discuss different ways we can save our earth. This is a great time to talk about the all important three R's of saving our earth: reduce, recycle, reuse.
• Host an environmental lunch. The day before the lunch, talk to the children about all the litter that is part of a normal lunch by today's standards. Gather up all the juice boxes, packaging, paper and plastic products and paste them on a big sheet of poster board. Make a title for the board. On the day of the environmental lunch, teach the children how to pack their lunches in reusable juice containers, making a sandwich or packing crackers and cheese in a plastic bag instead of buying prepackaged products, etc. Take the leftover garbage an glue it to another poster board. Observe the difference and talk about the overuse of landfills.
• Discuss ways you can reuse, recycle and reduce at the daycare. Put these ideas into practice.