Celebrating Our Planet: Engaging Earth Day Play-Based Learning Activities for Children
Earth Day is a special opportunity to teach our young learners about the importance of environmental stewardship and the role they can play in preserving our beautiful planet. This blog post explores a variety of play-based learning activities that not only celebrate Earth Day but also instill a lifelong appreciation for nature. From outdoor scavenger hunts that encourage exploration of the natural world to recycled art projects that promote sustainability, these activities are designed to spark curiosity and foster a deeper connection with the environment.
Each activity is crafted with the developmental needs of children in mind, ensuring that they are accessible, engaging, and educational. We’ll delve into garden-based learning where children can get their hands dirty planting seeds, which teaches them about the life cycles of plants and the importance of biodiversity. We also include activities like nature walks and DIY bird feeders that help children observe and support local wildlife.
Our Earth Day activities are more than just fun; they are stepping stones for discussions about pollution, conservation, and how we can all contribute to a healthier earth. These experiences are perfect for developing scientific thinking, enhancing sensory skills, and promoting empathy towards living things.
Join us in celebrating Earth Day with these playful and educational activities that promise to leave a lasting impact on your young learners, inspiring them to become caretakers of our planet today and every day.
Nature Inspired Earth
Can you create the earth with chalk and nature materials you find in your community? This is such a fun, easy and collaborative way to celebrate earth day with your little learners!
Go outside and begin observing the nature in your community and look for different shades of green. Collect samples and bring them to a meeting point and invite children to share their nature find and what they notice about it.
Then take green and blue chalk and draw the outline of planet earth, colour in the space left for the oceans with blue chalk. Then in the green land spaces invite children to collaboratively create earth!
Can you help save the animals from the oil spill?
An oil spill is a form of pollution - harmful or poisonous things that people put into the environment. Oil spills usually happen in the ocean, but oil can spill on land as well. These spills cause many devastating effects - mainly to plants and animals. This small world allows children to explore the effects of an oil spill on an ocean ecosystem!
Fill your PlayTray with water and then design your ocean ecosystem with plant and animals you would find in the ocean! Then mix cocoa powder with oil to create a murky oil mixture to mimic an oil spill. Then add cut up plastics to add to your floating oil spill to represent the plastic waste we find in the ocean. Then in the compartments add clean water, dawn dish soap, a toothbrush, tweezers and pipettes for children to explore and help the ocean with!
This activity has a chance to make a lasting impact on how we have to keep our water clean! To help support the learning watch the dawn dish soap commercial about using soap to help remove oil and try it with your animals.
Books for Earth Day
Sharing books with kids about our natural world—and especially about what we can do to take care of it—is important all year long! But today on Earth Day, it is a great way to start a conversation about what small chances we can make today that will help us care for the earth everyday.
These books are all great examples of caring for the earth from different perspectives:
-A Change Starts with Us talks about environmental activism and practical ways young children can take care of earth!
-On Our Nature Walk is an inquiry based book phrased like a conversation that helps children learn about the world around them and what environmental activists are doing to help it!
-Be a Good Ancestor: This book address the environment from indigenous perspectives of being a good ancestor to the world around you!
-Who's Looking? is from the perspective of nature watching us using scientific terms to remind us even though we see things differently we share the world.
-Compost Stew: This books shares about the wonders of compost and how it helps the planet!
-The Amicus Book of Nature: shares all about nature and the world around us.
Compost Stew Sensory Bin
Let's learn about the process of composting and how it contributes to daily environmental stewardship. Composting is the process of recycling organic matter, such as leaves and food scraps, into fertilizer to enrich the soil.
By talking about composting, they will learn about the three environmental Rs (reduce, recycle, and reuse), what items are biodegradable, the importance of worms & insects, and much more! This sensory bin let's your learners explore
composting without the mess and smell? Let’s teach about turning kitchen scraps into super soil!
Fill your playtray with dirt and then place natural materials like leaves, flowers, paper, and cardboard for compost layers and then add natural inspired materials like fruit, vegetables, coffee grounds and more! Add a spray bottle filled with water and gardening materials. Then read the book Compost Stew to aid your investigation!
Why not challenge your little learners to sort play food, or images, into compostable vs. non-compostable!
Sort The Waste
Can you sort the waste into recycle, compost and garbage?
This activity is a great way to help kids practice sorting their waste and recognize how by
properly sorting recycling from garbage and compost, we're helping to improve air and water quality and reduce greenhouse gas emissions! Properly sorting waste means that less ends up in landfills and more of what we throw away can be reused and recycled. This is a great way to contribute each day to caring for planet.
Ways to extend the play:
-Talk about what the recycling logo looks like and identify it on different items
-Talk about items that can be recycled or not
-Talk about the different roles of each kind of waste management system
Can You Fill the Recycling Bins
Can you sort and fill the recycling bins? This is such a fun and easy way to talk about recycling and sustainability with your little learners!
Recycling is essential for conserving resources, reducing waste, and protecting the environment. Teaching children to recycle not only instills eco-friendly habits but also empowers them to become stewards of the planet, contributing to a more sustainable and resilient future!
Take your playtray and in each compartment label it paper, metal, glass or plastic to help your little learners sort! Then add cards with different recyclable items on them in front and encourage them to identify them and sort into the proper recycling bin
Nature Bird Feeders
This fun and easy outdoor nature inspired craft that will have your local birds coming by to visit all the time! All you need is 1/3 sugar, 1/3 water, 1/3 flour and birdseed!
In a playtray pour in all your birdseed so children can easily cover their craft roll in tasty treats for the birds! In one of the compartments add your sugar, water and flour to make a paste and then with paint brushes and have children cover the craft roll and then dip it in the bird seed! Add string through and then hang them up in trees for birds!
This activity is a fun and easy way to celebrate earth day! Simply cut a circular shape from a piece of paper to act as the base of your earth and then offer children blue and green loose parts of every shade. To help them create you can read a story about earth and the meaning of earth day as well as show a reference photo of earth and encourage them to create!
To modify this activity you can use recycled craft materials, magazine pages, recyclable containers and more to encourage sustainability and allow them to make an activity they can keep!
The best part about this activity is each version of earth will be unique and based on each's child interpretation of what they think Earth looks like!
Neighbourhood Clean Up
This hands-on Earth Day-inspired small world play setup is all about keeping our community clean—while building key early learning skills!
We used colourful scrap paper to create pretend litter and scattered it around our turf tray. Children used tweezers to sort the “trash” into matching coloured houses and helped the mini garbage truck clean up the neighbourhood!
Why is this activity beneficial?
- Cognitive Development: Supports sorting, colour recognition, and early environmental awareness.
- Earth Day Learning: Sparks conversations about taking care of our planet and why littering matters.
- Fine Motor Skills: Using tweezers to grasp paper pieces strengthens finger muscles and hand-eye coordination.
Extend the Learning:
- Ask, “Why is it important to keep our neighbourhood clean?” or “Where else can we sort recycling?”.
- Try sorting by shape or size to build on visual discrimination skills.
- Add role-play dialogue as the ‘clean-up crew’ drives around helping others—fostering empathy and social skills.
A perfect spring invitation to play that blends Earth Day learning with community care.
As we conclude our exploration of Earth Day play-based learning activities, we hope these ideas inspire you and your little learners to get outdoors, explore the natural world, and make a positive impact on our environment. Each activity is designed not just for fun, but to cultivate a sense of responsibility and love for our planet. By engaging children in activities like recycled crafting, gardening, and wildlife observation, we're planting the seeds for a greener future.
Remember, every small action counts, and by incorporating these Earth-friendly practices into play, children learn that they have the power to make a difference. So this Earth Day, let’s commit to giving back to our planet, which gives us so much every day. Continue to foster this connection with nature in your educational settings and homes—our Earth deserves it, and so do our future generations.
Happy Earth Day! May your celebrations be filled with joy and a renewed commitment to protect our beautiful planet.