Upcycled Crafts to Make for Earth Day

Using upcycled materials in crafts and projects is a great idea any time of year, but it’s especially appropriate around Earth Day. (One of the most popular posts ever on my blog Our Daily Craft is a building challenge made with upcycled materials.)

Making a pencil jar is a classic upcycled art project, and you can learn how to do it with a glass jar and tissue paper from In the Playroom. You could also paint the jars, decorate them with other paper images or whatever you like. Use them for pencils, paint brushes, or anything else small you need to hold.

Use bits of colorful paper from the recycling to make a recycling logo collage with this idea from Crafts On Sea. This would be fun to hang in your recycling area in the classroom or at home, and of course you can make collages like this with all sorts of themes when you’re done with this poster. (You could also do it with fabric scraps.)

While you’re using up colorful paper or fabric scraps, you can also make upcycled beads to use in jewelry projects. Kids Activities Blog has the how-to done with strips of magazines, but I’ve done the same thing with fabric and it always comes out cool looking.

If your classroom or home library has some books that are past their prime, you can upcycle them to make bookmarks. Kelly’s Classroom has the simple tutorial. If you don’t have a laminator you can buy bookmark sleeves or cover the bookmarks with clear packing tape.

Making paper mache is a great way to use old newspapers, and Red Ted Art ties it into Earth Day with a project to make paper mache planets. Make just the earth or a whole solar system!

I’ve seen a lot of crafts that call for using cardboard egg cartons, but you don’t see a lot that use the plastic ones. (We did a plastic egg carton musical instrument once.) But you can make necklaces with plastic egg cartons similar to using purchased shrink plastic. Check out how to make your own at Little Bins for Little Hands.

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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