Earth Day Printables and Activities

I know doing printables for Earth Day doesn’t sound very eco friendly, but it does give you a chance to talk to kids about how you can make the classroom or the home a little greener by only printing what you need, using low ink or only black and white printing, printing on the back of other pages, using recycled paper and recycling what you can when you are done.

These Earth Day printables help kids learn about Earth Day or use earth designs.

Pre-K Pages has Earth Day math printables, including a dice rolling game with a recycling theme, graphing, number grouping and sequencing activities.

123 Homeschool 4 Me has a variety of printables for Earth Day including writing prompts, plant life cycle worksheets and links to other activities.

A Dab of Glue will Do has a little printable emergent reader book that explores the basics of Earth Day and some things we can all do to be kind to the planet. You can print it in color or black and white and have kids color it themselves.

Speaking of coloring pages, Preschool Mom has a collection of coloring pages with color versions that you can use as posters in the classroom as well as having kids color the black and white ones.

I love all the printable hands on activities from Differentiated Kindergarten, which help kids build fine motor skills with an Earth Day twist. You’ll find printable mats for use with playdough, geo boards, snap cubes, pattern blocks and Legos, as well as a Q-tip painting activity. You can get these when you sign up for emails.

Here are a few more quick printable Earth Day activities for your kiddos:

Crayons and Cravings: Earth Day Word Search
Tot Schooling: Color by Letter and Happy and Sad Earth Sorting Activity
Rock Your Homeschool: Earth Day Cootie Catcher

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]

Have you read?

Leave a Reply