At this age, young children may have a difficult time understanding the scientific dilemma of global warming, so instead we focus on what we can do to improve our world. To foster awareness of the issue of global warming and how it may affect us, we removed trash for our Arctic animal friends and stuck any “glaciers” we found back together with toothpicks. We learned about where the Arctic is, and why it is important. We also read a book that relayed to us several important facts. One was that average temperatures in the Arctic region are rising twice as fast as they are elsewhere in the world. Your little one also discovered that Arctic ice is getting thinner – melting and rupturing. Secondly, your budding activist listened to a story about Percy the Polar Bear and his adventures up north. Percy relayed the ecology of this beautiful land mass. That the melting of the once-permanent ice is already affecting native people, wildlife and plants. All of these components enabled your blossoming ecologist to perceive how this societal problem can translate into opportunities for their own future.

Young children have probably heard about oil spills, but they may not understand how they affect our environment. This oil spill activity exposed your young activists to  the importance of protecting our natural resources from harmful events like oil spills. Using dish soap, feathers and oil, we learned about how oil affects the birds most vulnerable to oil spills. In addition to promoting an awareness of environmental issues, this activity also served as an opportunity to experiment with complicated measurement concepts such as width, height, volume and density.

To extend the idea of taking care of the Earth into our environmental theme, your little ones participated in an activity called the Earth Day fishing game.

To prepare the game, magnets were added to fish and to different pieces of trash.

Trash was also stapled to the back of each fish.

Our fishing poles had a magnet wrapped up in the end of the string to pick up the magnetic trash and fish out of the pond.

Your maturing pollution experts were told that if they looked closely into the pond, they would see that someone had thrown things that don’t belong into the water.

We talked about how some of those things were even getting stuck on the fish and we needed to rescue them.

The children spent the morning catching tin cans, plastic bottles, toilet paper rolls, and even fish. But sadly, each of our fish had trash stuck to the backside of their body.

As each child caught a fish, we flipped it over to see what was on the bottom of the fish and asked questions like – “Is this good for our fish?” or “Does this belong in the pond?”