Earth Day Recycling Projects & Bulletin Board Ideas for the Classroom

Earth Day is celebrated by over 175 countries on April 22 of each year. Earth Day is a day to not only celebrate the gifts of the earth but to educate one another on how to live a more sustainable lifestyle and to promote eco-friendly habits to protect our environment.

These Earth Day lesson plans will include a bulletin board idea for April, a recycling project and several math projects.

The Earth Day Bulletin Board Ideas:

The background

Obviously cutting up rolls of perfectly good paper to create an Earth Day bulletin board would clash with the message of more resourceful and less wasteful, wouldn't it? The entire back of the bulletin board can be covered with newspaper that can be recycled later.

The border

Teachers are famous for our bulletin board borders. We think bulletin boards need outlines just as much as term papers do. Teachers don't have to forgo their bulletin board borders for Earth Day. It can add to the math lessons and the recycling project.

Option one

Have students measure the circumference of the bulletin board and divide the inches by the number of students in the class. For example, a bulletin board that is 3 foot by 5 foot has a circumference of 15 feet or 192 inches. If there are 16 students in the class each will bring a sample of recyclable material 12 inches long. Let the class know how wide you would like your borders strips to be. Ask them to bring in a piece of cardboard or other mixed paper measured and cut to the border specifications.

Option two

The border and the math can be done in the opposite directions as well. For example, if a class brainstormed about a common example of mixed paper and chose soup labels, then the class could measure a soup label and work the math. How many soup labels will be needed to go around the border of the Earth Day bulletin board? How many soup labels should each student collect if the number of labels needed is divided by the number of number of students?

The Recycling Project

For the recycling project collect three plastic gallon milk jugs and use a utility knife to cut the tops off. These will be stapled to the bulletin boards as mini-recycling stations. Instead of recycling cans, plastic bottles and cereal boxes, students will bring in bottle caps, cereal box tops and can labels to represent items that they have recycled. Choose a start and finish date for collecting the tokens that represent recycling.

This is a good time to remind students of these good practices when recycling:

Tops should always be removed from plastic bottles before recycling.

Labels should be removed from tin cans and put into mixed paper.

Cereal (and other) boxes should be cut down to take up less room.

This project will reinforce each of these good recycling practices.

On the bulletin board itself have students use non-toxic markers to create graphs to record the number of recycled items in each category. At the conclusion students can do more math to project the impact of recycling further. For example, if 16 families recycled 64 cans in one month, how many cans could be recycled by (the number of families in the entire 5^th grade, entire school, entire town and so on.)

When you take down your Earth Day bulletin board be sure to recycle everything that is recyclable and brainstorm with your students how future bulletin boards can more eco-friendly as well.