Pinterest Inspired Earth Day (Week) Lessons

Earth Day was made into a week of lessons here in our homeschool classroom with fun projects found on Pinterest. We started with a fun lesson that we are still covering on habitats. We looked up and wrote down the meaning of the word habitat. Then we looked up different types of habitats that wild creatures live in. We are going to be doing some more reading on different animals and we are starting our wild about nature journals where my kids will be drawing wild creatures they see or learn about, writing about their natural habitats and more. Thus it will be an on going study.  This led us into our first project Sunday evening. I found this bird house on Pinterest with no back and attached to a window. How perfect for watching a bird build a nest, lay it's eggs and raise it's young.
 get this

I showed this to my DH and he of course drew up some plans to build me some. We are building enough for multiple windows so we can hopefully catch more than one kind of bird to watch.  So we went and got the materials needed during the previous week. I will do a blog later with all of the cuts, materials and time needed but this project cost us less than $10.
Here  are some pictures from the fun 

The finished pictures will come a little later becasue we have had some rain and cold weather so We have had to wait to paint it and hang it out side.

Our Earth Day lesson was conservation. We defined the word conservation.. We discussed and wrote up why we would want to help keep the planet clean and less polluted. We defined pollution and discussed types of pollution. We discussed how making more things at home can be earth friendly. We also discussed the concept of reduce,reuse,recycle. Then we discussed ways we do those things. This led us into another project. We made homemade bubble solution and reused water bottles to blow the bubbles with. I got these ideas from Pinterest.

 get thisget this
 
I made a smaller amount of the bubble solution for us to try out. I cut the bottles in different ways. We had some with just the bottoms off. Some with just the tops cut just before the lables. Then lastly some with just the middles, no tops and no bottoms. I asked the kids when it came to the bottles if we were reducing,reusing or recycling to help reemphasize our lesson. 
Here are some of pictures from the fun. The older two did not really want to blow bubbles with mom. So they ended up reading,skating and rip sticking instead but that was ok because once the bubbles were made the lesson was on hold and in place laughter and fun were inserted. 
Here are some pictures from the fun we had. 

 The bubble solution was a good one and we will be making it again. The top only and center only bottles worked a little better than just the bottom of the bottle cut off.

Coyote was content to sit to blow bubble. Sunny Bunny had more fun flinging the water bottles through the air to make her bubbles.

We are still working on a few more projects that I will share in another post. I hope your Earth Day was a good one. Thanks for reading.