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.

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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