Earth Day Shenanigans!

Take a close look...

Does anything seem out of place?

Our Earth Day celebration took a fun and exciting turn when the red tail hawk, brought by one of our presenters, decided she wanted to be free!  She was gorgeous.  I think I could have stayed all day just watching her sit up there on her make-shift perch!

I absolutely love our Earth Day celebrations.  The kids have a full day of learning from presenters, they have some time to give back by cleaning up trash around our school, and we sometimes get some "downtime" to do a fun activity in our classroom!

In writing, the kiddos have been working hard on opinion and persuasive pieces that would make the world a better place.  They did a nice job writing about recycling, not littering, and why we shouldn't cut down trees.  During a portion of this unit we explored how to recycle school supplies.  A colleague of mine introduced us to Crazy Crayons out of Minnesota.  They take old, broken crayons and re-melt them into fun shapes.  Seeing the fun shapes and crazy colors really got the kiddos excited.  So, we decided to re-purpose some of our old crayons on Earth Day!  Take a look:

Step 1: Fill silicon molds with broken crayons

Step 2: Put in oven and watch the transformation.  Solid-to liquid

Step 3:  Cooled to a solid again and so incredibly cool!

Now this is what teaching is about! The excitement from the kids over the transformation was so fun!  They each got to bring home their own crayon- it was all they could talk about (and show to whoever would look and listen) as we were walking out to the buses that day.  What an impact!

In addition to recycling our old crayons, the students made promises to the earth.  They took this so seriously!  I just love how this display brightened up our hallway!

One month to go!  Happy Monday!