April 22nd is Earth Day and it definitely requires a concrete and elaborate Earth Day Lesson Plan. After all, you celebrate Valentines Day with roses and heart-shaped cookies, religiously keep Friendship Day and plan a bash for your boss on Boss Day even when you are cursing him at his back. Then why should Earth Day get the miss!
Earth Day lessons are great ways to inspire the importance of the occasion in your kids. And you should include fun-filled activities in your Earth Day lesson plans so as to appeal to your children. Planning an Earth Day activity doesn’t involve having to travel to the ends of the earth to acquire the raw materials.
For instance, you can arrange a lesson for your kids that will help them better appreciate the diversity and richness of the animal kingdom and especially the endangered species of the world. The kids are required to create an ABC Book of Endangered Animals after researching a particular animal’s habits and habitats and the reasons for its vulnerability. Named “ABC of Endangered Species”, this lesson is apt for kids in K-2 and 3rd-8th standards.
All you will need for this lesson are Internet access or library resources about animals and/or endangered species, a world map and the requisite stationary. With this Earth Day lesson, you can hope to have your children grow up into enlightened and concerned adults who will be pro-active enough to prevent an animal from meeting the same fate as the dodo.
With pollution steadily on the rise, it is high time that your kids learnt the significance of hazardous waste management. And it is especially important for the children to understand that common household items like paint, motor oil, bug sprays, some prescription drugs, cleaners, drain openers, light bulbs, batteries and air fresheners can also constitute unsafe waste products and hence should be handled with caution.
You can well devise a lesson that will educate the kids about the various hazardous waste products, ways to safely get rid of them and then create awareness posters to spread their knowledge. This can be an apt and quite relevant lesson to execute on Earth Day and you will just need web or library resources regarding harmful garbage and art supplies to go forward with your “Clean Up Hazardous Waste!” plans. This lesson is ideal for grade 3rd-12th grades.
Since it is Earth Day, it is a good idea to conduct activities or lesson plans that will teach your children about Mother Earth. “Earth from Space Maps” is a great lesson to acquaint the kids with the geography of the planet they are living in. Thus, you can make them assemble a large picture of Earth from images taken from the space and identify in it landforms, water bodies and other topographic features.
The children can of course take help from the Internet or library resources to make their Earth image. And what is more, you can customize this lesson to suit the interests and intellect levels of children from different grades. Thus, young children can be asked to identify water bodies in the map while you can have the older kids tag continents, significant latitude and longitude marks and the like on the map.
An Earth Day lesson plan is the ideal way to have kids acquaint themselves and appreciate the bounties of Mother Earth and understand their weaknesses.