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.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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