Theme Thursday: Earth Day

I'd feel like a bad environmental sciences major if we didn't do something to celebrate Earth Day. The majority of our story time appropriate books on Earth Day were already checked out, and I worked mainly from home on Wednesday, so this turned into one of those theme days that has very little to do with the actual theme. Or maybe, everything we did was Earth Day related since everything was about something on our big, beautiful world.

I was in such dire straights looking for Earth Day books, that I considered using Ashley Bryan's absolutely gorgeous All Things Bright and Beautiful, and changing "the Lord God made them all" to "Mother Earth made/has them all." But I figured that might be a touch too close to plagiarism and kept scrounging around until I found the books we ended up using.

Song: Good Morning Dear Earth

Flannel: Little Mouse

Poem: I Had a Little Turtle

Flannel: Alphabet Soup- EARTH

Book: The Whole Green World by Tony Johnston

Flannel: Blue is the Lake

Song: Shake Your Sillies

Song: Head, Shoulder, Knees and Toes

Rhyme: Big, Big, Big

Song: Open, Shut Them

Book:  Green By Laura Vaccaro Seeger

Flannel: Chomp Like a Shark

Song: Turn Around from Getting to know Myself

Make and Take Craft: E is for Earth Collages

Supplies:

-E is for Earth templates (prepared beforehand)

-land shapes (prepared beforehand)

-glue sticks

-crayons

Process: After introducing the craft before the Turn Around song, I laid out crayons, land shapes and glue sticks out on the table and gave each child a E is for Earth pre-prepared paper. Caregivers helped the kids glue green land shapes to the blue circle for the world and use crayons around the rest of the page. A lot took the opportunity to spell E-A-R-T-H with crayons or the child's name, asking what each letter was after it had been printed.

Time: Prep took a very fevered 25 minutes in the morning before story time and the craft took about 20. We're also lucky enough to have a Die Cut machine that really helped save time on making all the construction paper "E"s