A Fun Earth Day Recycled Garden Activity

This is a wild, fun, and free way to celebrate Earth Day! Your students will upcycle trash into beautiful flowers, while also practicing measurement.

1. Have your students collect paper scraps (trash) from both the classroom and home, over the course of several days. Each day, whatever they collect is tossed into one big, communal box in the corner of your room.

2. On the big day, have each student design his/her dream flower, using a piece of paper and colored pencils. What would they like their unique, individual flowers to look like? (While they are designing, empty contents of their paper-scraps box onto a table.)

3. Have the kids head to the “scraps table” that contains all the materials the class collected to be upcycled. Which pieces will best make their flower vision a reality?

4. They build their flowers, minus the stem.

5.  Once their flower is created, randomly assign each student a length for their flower stem. The students must then create a stem of that length for their flower, using a ruler to measure and check their stems. Assesses each student’s ability to measure accurately.

6. Finally, have fun cooperatively creating a paper garden on a wall in the classroom. “With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row!”