Every year we celebrate Earth Day on 22nd April. Earth Day is all about loving our planet and doing what we can to protect and care for it. It’s a good excuse for us to talk about things such as recycling, reducing our energy usage and what we can do to lower our personal impact on the planet. We will be doing a few things at home to mark Earth Day, such as reading some books about the environment, learning more about recycling and doing some Earth Day craft.

To start us thinking about Earth Day, we began with a really simple but quite effective Earth Day craft. We painted a little globe, glittered it up and wrote a little message underneath. It’s easy to do and would be great to do with your child, or a group of children.

Easy Earth Day Craft

You will need:
One piece of blue card
Green poster paint
A pencil
A side plate to draw around
The hand of a small child
Some white card
A pair of scissors
Green glitter or a glitter pen
Glue

How to make your Earth Day craft:
Take your side plate and put it on the blue piece of card, draw around it with your pencil. Liberally paint the palm of the hand of a small child with the green poster paint and press it in the middle of your circle. Wash the hand of the small child before it touches your walls (this part is very important).

Hand the paintbrush over to the newly clean handed small child and get them to paint a few islands and continents on your globe. When this has been done to everyone’s satisfaction, either sprinkle green glitter over the hand-print or leave the paint to dry and then decorate with glitter pens.

While the masterpiece dries, take a piece of white card and cut it down to size. Get the small child to write a suitable statement on the card, we went for “I love Planet Earth”. Which seemed like a suitable catch-all. Stick the writing on the blue card below the planet. I used Bostik glu dots, but use what you have, a glue stick or PVA or whatever. Your Earth Day craft is now complete.

Don’t forget to recycle it when you’ve finished with it!

If you want to learn more about Earth Day or explore the topic of recycling with your child, there are some free to download worksheets here.

If you enjoyed this, you might also like to make some cool egg and cress heads.