Earth Day Activities for Kids

I feel like I’ve written about Earth Day a lot, and that’s a good thing because it’s important to take some time to think about how humans are treating the earth and things we can do to help it.

We’ve covered Earth Day printables, some crafts and recycled activities, and shard ideas for celebrating Earth Day with kids.

How about some Earth Day games? My Motherhood Made Easy has a set of printable Earth Day themed games including bingo, a word scramble, maze and puzzles. These would be great to use in a classroom when you’re talking about Earth Day, or you can use at least some of them at home, depending on how many kids you have.

I love a good STEM challenge, and of course there are Earth Day themed STEM challenges out there. The Homeschool Resource Room has a great list of STEM projects you can try for Earth Day, including making a potato battery and building with recyclable materials. Some of these wouldn’t work as well in a classroom but they’re great for home.

Kids can figure out how their choices make an environmental impact with this carbon footprint printable activity from Little Bins for Little Hands. It’s a good way to focus on little things that we all can do that collectively can make a difference for the planet.

The I can help the earth worksheet printable from Crafts By Ria is another way to have these conversations, and you can turn the printed sheet into a little book while you talk about different things kids can do to help the planet such as recycling and walking places when they can.

Speaking of recycling, Adventure in a Box has a printable game for sorting the recycling to help kids learn what is and is not able to be recycled. You can also talk about how some food items can be composted and different ways the recycling might be separated to make it easier to recycle.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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