Arbor Day for Kids

April 20, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Arbor Day is a day dedicated to the planting and appreciation of trees. It is celebrated on the last Friday in April in the United States. The first Arbor Day was celebrated on April 10, 1872, in Nebraska. More than one million trees were planted on that day. Arbor Day is now celebrated in all 50 states and in many other countries around the world.

Arbor Day is a reminder of the importance of trees to our environment. Trees provide us with oxygen, clean air, and water. They also help to regulate the climate and provide habitat for wildlife. Trees can also beautify our communities and make them more livable.

Kids can take part in Arbor Day by planting a tree or learning more about trees in your yard, playground or town. (Maybe also climbing a tree if the weather is nice.) Or try a tree-related scavenger hunt like this one from Homeschool of 1.

Woo Jr. has lots of great printables about Arbor Day, including fact sheets, leaf identification, a page for doing research about the state tree of a state, a word search, a crossword and more. This is a great place to start building your lessons.

Raising Our Kids has a good collection of Arbor Day coloring sheets, as does Best Coloring Pages for Kids. Or grab a word search from Monster Word Search.

And of course there are all sorts of tree related crafts that you can make to cap off your Arbor Day celebration (or make while you’re reading or watching The Lorax, of course!). There’s a nice collection of tree crafts for Arbor Day or any other time available from Fun Family Crafts. Or have kiddos draw their favorite tree and share a story about it.

How about making a chocolate popcorn tree for a snack? Get the instructions from Hungry Happenings.

Have you read?

Printable Letter Books for Preschoolers

I did a post earlier this year with activities and ideas for teaching the alphabet, but a lot or learning letters and recognizing them just has to do with seeing them and working with them a lot.

That means coloring, tracing, identifying things that start with different letters and more.

One way to reinforce the letters is through little activity books like these cute printable alphabet books from Life Over Cs.

These are available for free when you subscribe to her newsletter, and I’d say that’s well worth it if you have a little one (or a group of little ones!) working on the alphabet and letter recognition.

Each mini book includes a collection of things that start with that letter to color, color and read with words that start with the letter, tracing the letter, finding the letter in a grid and other coloring pages with objects that start with that letter.

These little books are super useful reinforcing the different letters and giving kids different activities related to the letters.

If you do a letter of the day or letter of the week you can use a new book for each one, and then keep the copies in your reading center or in a basket where kids can look at them again.

And of course you can add in all the other letter activities you like, go on a scavenger hunt for items that start with that letter, read alphabet books, practice writing letters in rice or with pompoms or playdough or whatever sensory activities you like.

You can grab the free printables when you enter you email address at Life Over Cs, and check out her other great alphabet resources and activities while you are over there.

Do you have favorite activities for teaching letters to kids? I’d love to hear about them!

[Photo: Life Over Cs]

Have you read?

Leave a Reply