Celebrating the Earth

We have to help take care of our beautiful earth and all of the creatures that live here... 

those on land...

in the arctic...

in the oceans...

in the rain forest...

in the ponds...

and the desert...

After reading The Earth and I by Frank Asch, 

we talked about our world and the things we could do to help take care of it as we held the "world" in our hands and sang, "We've Got the Whole World in our Hands".

Swirling finger paints of blue, green, turquoise and purple, we created the oceans of our earth. We painted our hands green and printed them on our earth to represent the land. 

Many animals of our earth have become extinct or are close to extinction. We read No More Dodos by Amanda Wallwork and Panda Bear, Panda Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle, and came up with our own special ideas for helping animals and people on our earth.

                             

We read a very sad book called The River by David Bellamy

which is the story of a river teaming with wildlife- in the water and all along its shores.  When a big industrial plant pollutes the water, the book illustrates what happens to all of the creatures that were part of the river's ecosystem. After reading it, we played a fishing game to show how pollution and litter affected the fish in our little "pond". 

Grover's 10 Terrific Ways to Help Our Wonderful World gave us some great ideas for helping our world.

 We played a recyclable game. We had to decide whether we should repair, reuse or recycle a number of items headed for the trash can. It made for some great discussion!

The book, Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, told of the "lupine lady" who traveled the world, lived in a house by the sea, and planted lupine seeds to make the world more beautiful.

We went on a litter walk to clean up the neighborhood.

And then, we planted a flower to make our world an even more beautiful place!