Earth Day is celebrated today like every year in many countries of the World. A date indicated in the calendar with the aim of creating social awareness, since it is essential that all people let us be aware that the planet where we live needs us. The Earth is our home and we must take care of it and respect it as such, educating our children in ecological values.
The future inhabitants of the Earth have the right to enjoy this planet as we knew it. But at the rate of destruction, this will be terribly complicated. Therefore, it is essential that children learn to take care of the environment, that they learn to recycle being aware of its importance and above all, that they receive the example of all those around them, in order to become responsible adults with their planet.
On the occasion of the celebration of Earth Day, we propose these crafts to do with the children at home. Since children must learn by playing, what better way to do some activities with recycled materials and learn that to have fun, they do not need more than their imagination.
A globe
Image: Geniolandia
A globe is a representation of the Earth, the best way to project the land masses or the huge stretches of water that make up the planet. When a flat surface is used to draw the Earth, distortions and deformations of what reality is inevitably occur. However, the globe allows you to recreate the shape of the Earth to scale.
To make this craft so special with children, we are going to use a globe as a base, so that we can faithfully recreate the earth's surface. The materials you will need are the following:
- a balloon good size
- diary paper
- White glue
- water
- blue, white, brown and green paints
- a plastic lid (to be used as a base)
The steps to make this globe are as follows:
- First we have to inflate the balloon, taking care that it is not too tight and can break.
- We make a knot and with some pieces of adhesive tape, we fasten the balloon at the base of the lid of plastic.
- We cut strips of paper of newspaper about 5 centimeters.
- We prepare a mixture with 2 parts water and one part white glue, use a disposable container as it will be unusable later.
- Let's soaking paper strip box and place it on the balloon directly. We must cover the entire surface well, placing several layers of paper.
- We let it dry overnight and we can paint it with the temperas.
A forest made with recycled materials
Image: Children's Crafts
To make this craft we are going to use the collage technique, very easy to do and perfect for working with younger children. You can add as many elements as you want, you will only need a larger card to have a good base to work on. These are the basic materials you need to start this recycled forest:
- corrugated cardboard (You can take it out of some packing boxes, in any store they will give them to you without problems)
- eggshells
- plastic bottle caps
- small wood chips (You can find them in the field, always the ones you find on the ground since you should never take them directly from the tree)
- White glue
- Color paints
This is the step by step:
- We paint the background of the cardboard in a simple way, recreating a blue sky and a green part that will be the field area.
- We cut strips from the cardboard and We glue them to the base of the cardboard to create the tree trunks.
- With the different materials we will create the treetops. In one tree we put pieces of eggshell, in another the wood shavings, in another the bottle caps. If you want to make a bigger forest, you can add pieces of magazine paper or any catalog that they put in the mailboxes.
- When everything is dry we paint the treetops with different shades of green.
You can add everything you want, flowers, animals of the forest or whatever the children choose. Always of course, using recycled materials.