Every year on April 22, we celebrate Earth Day. We as teachers know it’s a great opportunity to focus the class on ways to help preserve the earth, talk about plants and animals and being a good steward of the planet we live on and, of course, tie it in with some of our science lesson plans. Below are some great ideas for making a class book that you can use!
Combining lesson plans and making a unit that relates to a theme for several subjects is always ideal. It helps your students focus on an idea and see how it works in science or math or, in this case, language arts.
Make a Class Book with These 3 Ideas to Celebrate Earth Day
Use Earth Day to create a unique and memorable classbook for your students—and even better, one relating to a science unit. We love when a good cross-curriculum lesson plan makes its way into the classroom!
Here are a few ideas to get you thinking about how to incorporate an Earth Day classbook into your lesson plans.
Book idea #1: Tell me about how your family participates in a recycling program. What is a creative way your family chooses to recycle?
Most kids nowadays understand, or at least see and help parents with recycling. Parents might ask children to use reusable water bottles or save a plastic bottle from going to the landfill by putting it in the recycling bin rather than the trash.
Combining this with a lesson plan from your science class that covers how recycling helps the earth would make a great writing prompt when you finish teaching your students about the importance of recycling.
PROJECT IDEA
The above writing prompt asks students to tell you about how their family recycles. This could be written as a step-by-step or narrative. After your students describe how they recycle, have them tell you about creative ways they have recycled in the past. For example, using big boxes to make a fort or large plastic bottles for crafts.
Finish off the project by having your students make a recycling ad poster that encourages people to recycle. Combine it with your students’ written pieces, and you’ll have the makings of an excellent Earth Day classbook. You could also have your class head outside and pick up litter in a park or have an upcycling craft day with water bottles and boxes to celebrate your classbooks being published!
Book idea #2: If trees could talk to us, what do you think they would tell us?
This particular writing prompt pairs nicely with a science lesson on trees and what they do for the environment, the different kinds of trees and the many reasons for keeping deforestation to a minimum. This is also a great opportunity to introduce your students to personification.
Your students will likely enjoy the creative aspect of this writing prompt and you will definitely be entertained by some of the answers they give.
Make sure they decide what kind of tree they are before they start writing—an oak, pine, birch, etc.—and then research a bit about what that particular tree characteristics are.
PROJECT IDEA
Using the answers your students gave in the writing prompt above
Have your students draw a picture of their tree that they picked, draw a face on the tree, and a speech bubble with a quote from their writing. Your students can add themselves to the picture as if they are having a conversation with the tree. Once you have both pieces of the project, then you can put everything together into a classbook that your students will be excited to show off to family and friends. You could even dedicate your classbook to a local nature preserve in your area!
Book idea #3: Describe in detail one interesting thing that happens in nature . For example, hurricanes, blizzards or earthquakes.
Kids are naturally attracted to and excited by some of the more amazing weather and natural occurrences on our Earth. To tie into Earth Day, you could use the chance to cover some of the amazing phenomena that occur on this planet, including blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, tectonic plate shifts, volcanoes erupting, earthquakes and more.
While you certainly don’t want to scare anyone, it would be easy and allow your students to get a clear visual if you show some videos of these events in nature and just how powerful they are. National Geographic has a ton of photos depicting these extreme weather events that are not scary and could get your students excited about this writing prompt.
This particular activity allows your students to get experience doing research. You can change the level of expectations based on the grade you teach, providing a rubric worksheet for your students is an excellent way to help them understand how much research is required and what you expect will be included in the piece.
PROJECT IDEA
This writing activity is a chance for your students to practice their research skills. This prompt also gives students an opportunity to work on drafting, editing and finalizing writing. Check out our free editing and writing worksheets to help you improve your students’ self-editing techniques. These free, printable worksheets go over all the aspects of the writing process, so you’ll be able to pick and choose what might work for your class.
Have your students make an illustration of their natural event, hopefully adding in some of the details they learned during their research. This project definitely deserves preserving, so finish off the project by making a classbook. Your students will be thrilled that they are becoming published authors and it will be fun to read about all of the different weather-related events that happen in our world!
Additional resources
Want to explore other ideas, tips and thoughts on how to continue improving your students’ writing? Head over to our online teacher’s lounge to browse through the suggestions and resources. You never know what may spark a great idea for your next writing assignment!
And, of course, don’t forget that while you’re visiting, sign up to receive your free classbook publishing kit. Your students will be thrilled to become published authors and have a way to remember an excellent class project!