Earth Day Unit-{Day #3: Getting Digital & a FREEBIE!}

Holy cow! Today has got to be one of my absolute favorite days we have had this year because my students seriously blew me away with their abilities. I'll get to that in a moment, but first...

Happy Earth Day from Miss Law's Kinders!

We began our third day of our Earth Day unit by completing a super fun and adorable Earth Day craftivity. This craft has three hearts attached to the earth, each one with one of the three Rs on it: reduce, reuse, and recycle. We reviewed ways we can do all three in order to take care of our Earth, and then students wrote one way on each heart.

These made a great addition to our Earth Day hallway display. If you would like to grab this Earth Day Craftivity FREEBIE for your class, click here. 

After getting our arts and crafts on, we decided to go digital and write our own Earth Day books using the Book Creator app on our iPads. Now, this is where my socks were knocked off by my students. I told my class that I wanted each of us to create our own book on Earth Day and we orally brainstormed some ideas of what our books could be about. Since we have been spending quite a bit of time discussing the three Rs, it wasn't really any surprise when several of them said, "We can write about ways we can do the three Rs." They took that idea, and ran with it. I literally gave them all creative rights in making this book. They titled it Earth Day and decided that the most appropriate image to go on the front cover was the earth. 

After we typed and added our title and names to the front cover, we switched apps to our Kidrex app. What is the Kidrex app you ask? It is a kid-friendly search engine that you can feel good about your kiddos exploring in. My students typed in Earth in the search bar, clicked on one of the links, found an image of Earth, and saved it to their camera roll. They then returned to their book cover and added the Earth image. 

I then allowed them to play around with changing the colors of their text and page backgrounds, which they LOVED!

We followed our cover page with an introduction page into what we really wanted to write about (the three Rs). This part needed a little scaffolding and I had to lend some serious ideas to get them to understand we needed to set the reader up for what they were going to read on the following pages. I made sure to use words that my students would be able to write type on their own, and with a few reminders of the silent e rule, they produced a great sentence. They then went back to Kidrex and typed in "the three rs" in the search bar and looked for a picture that would fit with our sentence. Every single student ended up with some sort of version of the recycle sign after exploring the links that Kidrex produced. They added it to their page, changed their colors around, and voila! Now on to the part they were itching to get to... the three Rs!

We paired up and took pictures of our partner showing examples of ways we can reduce, reuse, and recycle.

{Reducing our use of energy by turning off lights when we leave a room.}

{Reducing our water usage by turning off the water when brushing our teeth.}

 {Reducing energy by turning off the television when we leave a room or go to bed.}

 {Reusing plastic bags from the grocery store.}

 {Reusing other items for other uses. In this specific example, we use laundry baskets to keep our toys categorized for indoor recess.}

{Reusing old books by giving them to others or taking them to Goodwill.}

 {Recycle items such as glass or paper.}

Students then went back and made a page for reduce, reuse, and recycle and added their pictures to each page.

Check out this finished book by a sweet girl in my class. 

Was that not amazing?! 

Tomorrow we will be trying to learn iMovie to make a public service announcement on the three Rs. I'm hoping it goes as well as this did; however, it'll be our first time working in iMovie, so we shall see. If it goes well, you'll surely read all about it tomorrow. 

After working so hard on our Earth Day books, we went back to some crafting time and made Earth Day headbands, thanks to Danielle Mastandrea from Krazee 4 Kindergarten.

Thanks for stopping by!