Earth Month Part 1

As everyone knows Earth Day of course only takes place one day out of the year. That's twenty four hours, one thousand four hundred forty minutes, and eighty six thousand four hundred seconds. There is so much to learn about how to protect our plant that there is no way one can fit into just one day. So I decided to extent it to a whole month. Even a month isn't enough but its a great start.

Since last month we have started composting. The great thing about composting, and the fact that my family is mainly all vegans, is our trash is only dumped once or twice a month. Before we composted we were dumping it almost every other day.  We also ditched plastic grocery bags and produce bags when we go shopping. The plus side to this is we no longer have to figure out where to hid all our plastic bags and we save five cents for every cloth bag we take. We have also started using cloth in place of other disposable items. Ryan used cloth diapers, I use mama cloth, soon I will be making unpaper towels and napkins, and maybe even adventure into the world of family cloth. If everyone made one change, wither it be ditching the plastic bags, composting, giving up meat, or even using a towel instead of a paper towel to clean the counters we can all help our planet.

With that said, Ryan has started to learn what it means to be green. So far he loves the compost and especially enjoys planting. Every morning he has to go out and check on the worms. He even brings out his scraps from his breakfast, either his banana peel, strawberry steams, or carrot peels, to go feed them. When someone new comes over he has to take them outside to show off his worms. Now there is a funny side to his love for his worms is no matter how much he loves to watch them he is to scared to touch one. Every time I try to get him to hold one but nope he takes off running the opposite direction. Hopefully in time he will finally be able to hold one of these little guys.

To start off Earth month we did a simple activity.  We started out by learning about the different parts of a plant. We used things we found around the house to create our flower.

To make the flower I gathered objects from around the house. Dirt from the flower beds, yarn for the roots, a pipe cleaner for the stem (which got changed to a strip of green paper cause it wouldn't stick to the paper no matter what we did), we picked leaves from our tree, used pumpkin seeds to represent the seeds on the flower and in the ground, and for the flower we used a cupcake liner. I also made labels so Ryan could identify each part of the flower.

Ryan really enjoyed this project because he got to play with his two all time favorite things, dirt and glue. He started out by smearing mod podge on the bottom of the paper then sprinkled dirt on to it. Once he was done he glued a pumpkin seed into the dirt. Next I took the yarn and separated it so it would look even more like roots. As I mentioned before we had a hard time keeping the pipe cleaner sticking to the paper so I helped him cut out a long green strip for the stem instead. Next came the leaves. I had to help with this part cause no matter how many times I tried to tell him he needed to add the glue first he refused. So I placed the glue then let him put the leaves. Then came the flower. Ryan is learning how to use scissors by himself so I let him cut the petals on the cupcake liner by himself. After he glued the flower to the paper I had him add more pumpkin seeds to the center. The more gluing he got to do the happier he was. And everyone knows a happy kids means a happy mama. Lastly came the labeling. Through out the activity I would tell him the names of the different parts of the flower while we glued them. So at the end I would ask him if he remembered which was which. When he correctly told me where it was I would have him glue the right label on there. And that's that. We now have a very lovely flower hanging on our living room wall.