Two Neat Activities to Get Geared up for Earth Day: Mini Greenhouses and Wants Vs. Needs

The Center for Ecoliteracy has two very neat activities that are very timely for upcoming Earth Day...

Clip art copyrighted by Bobbie Peachey, http://webclipart.about.com
Allowed for use for educational purposes. Thank you, Bobbie:)

The first is a mini greenhouse that you can make from a CD case.

This activity is geared towards younger children, from about ages 3 to 9...
You could easily adapt this to a Montessori classroom or homeschool by placing the materials on a tray and having the child work through the steps after doing a short lesson about greenhouses with them. You could follow up by putting parts of a plant cards out on your shelves.

As an extnesion, it might be fun to plant different types of seeds instead of just one type of seed and to note the different results.

The second activity is about Wants and Needs and is geared to an older elementary aged child, approx. 9-12, but could be easily adapted for younger ones.

For a complete download of the cards and the lesson to accompany the cards, please follow this link to their great site.

In addition to the Wants Versus Needs activity, they also have some neat materials about project based learning that could work well both in the classroom setting and the homeschool setting.

Hope that you will enjoy these activities.

I happened to come across them as I was searching for something on Etsy. Just sounded so cool that I thought I would share. We are going to do the CD case mini greenhouses, so I will post photos in the upcoming weeks of ours. Please feel free to link to this post if you also make these.