Earth Day Service Project!

The month of April is a glorious month. If you’re living in a state with winter, you know exactly what I’m talking about 😉 Spring is so close you can smell it, flowers are beginning to bloom around the yard and the birds are finally chirping letting you know there’s life outside of your 4 walls besides SNOW! Our world is finally reawakening and there’s a lot on our to-do lists… Including Earth Day! Each year, teachers all over take time out of their regular scheduled program to teach students of all ages about the importance of taking care of our dear Mother Earth. Reading passages, cute paper projects, and fun bulletin boards are all wonderful, but why not try and take the impact you’re trying to make outside of your school? Why not try a service project!? Need a fun, SIMPLE, and cost free one? Keep reading!

Here’s all you need to do:

Find a local grocery story that is near your school, a place where the majority of your school’s families would be shopping. Call ahead and speak with the manager (so you don’t catch them off guard). Explain that Earth Day is approaching and you’d like to do a project with your class and you need their help. 🙂

Once you have their attention, reassure them that they won’t need to spend any money or donate any merchandise for this project – how can they say no now?!

Ask them to donate X number of brown PAPER grocery bags to your school. Explain that you’re going to have the students decorate them to help remind their community to reduce, reuse, and recycle for Earth Day! When the bags have all been decorated, explain that you’ll bring them back for the store to use with their customers the week/day of Earth Day!

Check out some of the adorable bags my scholars made a few years ago:

If the store will let you, you can even make a large banner to hang in the grocery store to let its patrons know who the bags were decorated by!

Community members from all over will receive these adorably decorated bags and be reminded of the importance to take care of our Earth! (Please remember to not have students put any personal information on the bags – even first and last names!) And don’t forget to let your students’ parents know to go grocery shopping that day too! They will definitely want to snag one of these bags for themselves!

So this Earth Day, help make a greater impact and let your students be involved! They will enjoy knowing that others will get to see their work and that they are reminding the public about such an important topic!

Also, I have this awesome and *F*R*E*E* Earth Day close reading passage for you! It’s great because the format of the passage just takes you 5-10 minutes a day to squeeze in and you just do a small bit of the close read at a time. Check out this great post to know more about my Close Reading process!