With Earth Day only a week away, my guess is that the three Rs (reducing, reusing, and recycling) are getting discussed in classrooms around the country. I’ve always felt teachers were pros at reducing, reusing, and recycling. Wouldn’t you agree? I mean, after all, who else but a teacher can turn a gum dispenser into a vase or a potato chip canister into a paintbrush holder? Gotta, gotta love it!
So I suggest, in the spirit of Earth Day, we teachers unite and spill our secrets for going green in the classroom. Who knows? One of your ideas could end up in an upcoming issue of The Mailbox. Of course, you’d have to agree to take a $20 gift certificate from us first!
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Diane
PS: Remember that today is the last day to be entered in this week’s giveaway (“Monday Giveaway!“). Don’t miss out. It’s easy to enter!
We have a craft closet at school – we are very lucky to have such a big closet – but we have our families hold onto tissue boxes, the square kind – we turn them into easter baskets and houses. paper towel tubes we turn into sand castles, rainsticks, and cut in half long ways and then again across I turn them into the body of a lightening bug. We save shoe boxes pringles cans, coffee cans, baby food jars, which we make candy holders and snow globes from. Anything our families give us and we can get enough of we make something from it – sometimes we even have to sit and wait for a bit. Right now I am collecting frosting containers to make letter of the week jars which I put items that start with our letter of the week. Love going green!!!
I like to reuse student milk cartons. Not only are they good for planting things, but they make excellent “garages.”
When we study transportation/travel, I like to cut the tops off of the containers and cover them with brown paper. I draw “bricks” on the sides, and on the tops I put dots (0-10). I then take a black permanent marker and write numbers on the tops of small toy cars. The students “drive” and “park” the cars in the garages, matching the correct number to the correct number of dots.
I also label cars with lowercase letters, and I have them drive and park the cars in the garage with the correct capital letter.
The students have a blast with these activities. 🙂
I use clean and empty fruit cup containers as paint containers. This way each child has his own and we just wash them and use them until they crack and then wash them again and they can go into the recycling bin.
Another thing I do is use clean empty milk jugs cut down for Halloween walks, Valentines day mailbox and egg hunts. I tell the Parents in October they need to furnish one for their child. Cut them down and have the child decorate a piece of paper to put around the jug. The child uses it for the holiday and then the parent returns it to us, we take the paper off and store it until we need it again.
Our preschool is a small coop. We have to purchase our paper towels. For the last 2 years we have the shopping Parent purchase the pick a size towels. The Children use the smallest size (about a Half sheet) to dry their hands and adults just pull a full size for themselves.
It has cut way down on the amount of paper towels used and its been a big savings to the school. Although the purchase cost is higher, we use less so they last longer.
We recycled glass jars, milk cartons, and paper towel tubes this year. We had each student bring in a glass jar and painted them. The students made a pencil holder for them to use at home……..they loved it! With the milk cartons the students made gingerbread houses and with the paper towel tubes, the art teacher incorporated them into an art project during class.
We prepared several boxes and labeled them with the different material types then had the kids sort the different items into the appropriate boxes. We got this idea from a new book called “Where Do Recyclable Materials Go?” The kids loved it. There was quite a lot of information that we used for the entire week!
Earth Day is a lot of fun when you involve food!
As part of “Going Green” at our preschool, we invite everyone to wear green or blue. (Which most everyone has since it was just St. Patrick’s Day!)
Then we also invite everyone to bring a green snack or other green food to share. Then we get really creative! Let’s say someone brought celery, but noone wants to eat it…I simply ask them what else we can do with it so that we don’t waste it and we came up with several ideas, but the class favorite was to use the celery as a paintbrush!
One year a mom brought applesauce cups and a little green jello mix to stir in. Everyone loved that it turned their tongues green for earth day and then we added the cleaned out applesauce cups to our free art center and to our block center for added recycling fun!