reduce, reuse, recycle at school and at home: ideas for the preschool crowd

Last week I had the pleasure of working 3 days at my three year old's preschool. They are in the middle of studying how to take care of the earth (reduce, reuse, recycle), mixed up with a garden & vegetable theme. He has learned so much and it has been great knowing he is learning things that are useful and relevant to his life right now. It was a great opportunity for me to get some new ideas as well, and now I'll pass them on to you.

I am always impressed with his teacher's hand made games and activities and especially liked the carrot- movement game pictured above. Children take turns picking a carrot from the egg carton garden, and are given a movement instruction that everyone does. She has a few variations on this throughout the classroom, but this is the one the kids loved.

I made one to use at our house, but of course used flowers instead of vegetables. It took me less than thirty minutes to make this using craft supplies I had already at the house (the popsicle sticks came from another project by the way- another way to re-use). I also chose to use this as an opportunity to reinforce spanish number concepts and counting, but stuck with the movement theme. We all benefit from a little extra movement in our days!

other ideas borrowed from the preschool:

using cardboard boxes as building blocks

milk caps as lily pads

3 dimensional recycled art

reusing boxes and cans to make a grocery store

and watching tadpoles grow connects us to other living creatures

And, the classroom also collected items for recycling and canned goods for those in need of food.

I like how she combines the idea of caring for the earth and caring for people.

Many thanks to my sons wonderful preschool for always inspiring me with fresh ideas for home!