Organized Recycling

If you and your students are recycling in the classroom, checkout Jinjerup's cheerful recycling labels. Just print on adhesive paper, cut on the dotted lines, stick, et voila!

These labels could also be printed and laminated for a sorting activity. Students can organize images of items by which bin each one should be disposed in. Older students could cut out magazine pictures to represent the things that should be dumped in each bin.

Image from Jinjerup.

Earth Month

I like to approach the entire month of April as the Earth Day Season. Every year, I offer my students the Extra Credit Recycling Challenge, inspired by ReadyMade magazine's MacGyver Challenge column, wherein readers are challenged each month to create something great using an item destined for the dumpster. In return I get all kinds of crafty cardboard box cabinets and tin can pencil cups through which students learned about creativity and conservation. The latter is a required learning objective; the former is a bonus!

So, in the spirit of Earth Month, here are some of my favorite re-use projects from here and there.
Learn how to sew juice pouches into a pencil bag with Skip to My Lou's tutorial.
Or, if you have a lot of juice pouches, visit Thrifty Fun to get instructions for making this tote bag.
For a different take on the recycled pencil holder, check out Craftzine's cereal box pencil case tutorial.
Perhaps most appropriate for this time of year when school is ending and supplies have been all used up is this jump rope made of dried up markers. Visit Mommy on a Shoestring for the complete tutorial.

Images from Skip to My Lou, Thrifty Fun, Craftzine, Mommy on a Shoestring.

Bird Brain

Nothing conveys the arrival of springtime more than the sound and sight of chirping birds. Set the scene for Spring learning with this bird mobile from French site Tomlitoo. Students can learn about these and other birds at whatbird where they can look up birds by name, location, shape, or color and even hear their calls.

Then get this print and fold origami bird made by Jacque Lynn Davis,

or turn an unfinished wooden bird house into a homemade bird feeder that can be remade again and again with instructions from Sewing in the Wendy City.

Images from Tomlitoo, Jacque Davis, and Sewing in the Wendy City.