Earth Day: Discovering our planet Earth.

How do you teach a three year old about our planet earth? That were precisely my thoughts on doing an Earth Day activity at home with a preschooler. April 22nd is celebrated at the earth day and as the theme sets in, there are wonderful blogger from across the world joining in a unique Earth Day blog hop hosted by Mommy Labs and Greening Avery and Sam.

I loved their initiative and it had motivated me to answer the question I started my post with. How to teach my young kid about the importance of this day. I figured out its not that difficult after all.
Thanks to the inborn skill called- Curiosity. I had already written a post about " Facilitating the Naturally Curious Child" in which I have observed the delight and the learning which results from curiosity.



Back to the question.  I broke the subject into categories like
Planet Earth-

• The Earth 
• The Sky
• The Universe
• The Mountains and Oceans

Also in my part 2 of the earth day series I will feature-

• The Clouds
• Animals World
• Flower and Trees
• Sun and Sunlight
• Water and Wind

My science encyclopedia came very handy in introducing all these concepts with little experiments.

The Earth: 

We up-cycled a plastic dome from a packaging waste and M dropped the glass color in the dome.  Blue for the ocean and green for the land. We let it dry for few hours before we could see how the earth looked from the outerspace.

Sky:
We learned more about the sky with Why the sky is blue? Experiment.
We added the some salt in the containers filled with water till it becomes milky. Milk powder can also be used in place of salt for this experiment. M wanted to add some colored ink on the containers but as a science experiment it is not required. We lowered the room lights and used a flashlight to see inside the container. The particles of salt/milk powder are like suspended particles in our atmosphere. The flashlight is the sun. It you see across the container you can see the yellow color. But if you see on the side of the container it will all look blue as our sky. Its beacuse all the other color are reflected and only blue is absorbed and that's why the sky looks blue.

The Universe:
This was an accidental discovery by M when she wanted to add drops of colored inks into our container for the Sky experiment. As the water was already saturated with salt. The ink particle floated onto the surface of water giving a cosmic feel to the entire experiment. We also took some prints of this cosmic world on a paper.

The Mountain and the Oceans:

An Egg Carton came in very handy in explaining the highest and the lowest points on the earth which are the mountains and the oceans. This a simple yet effective activity for little kids. I gave the yellow, green and blue tempera paints to M. The Blue was to fill up the deepest part of the egg cartons to make our ocean. And the yellow and green was to color the highest points i:e  Mountains.

 

I will continue with the remaining part of our Discovering the planet earth series in my upcoming posts where we will discover new secrets of our planet earth with our kids.
I wish that each one of us care for our planet earth and make a difference in our own ways.