Go Green This Earth Day!

At Kiddie Academy^® Educational Child Care, we care about the planet our children are inheriting. That’s why every year we look forward to celebrating Earth Day. It presents opportunities to teach children about conservation and ecology, combined with ways to make our communities cleaner and greener.
Kiddie Academy student celebrating Earth Day

Here are some fun ways to celebrate Earth Day with your child:

Infants:

– Sunshine and pinwheels: Enjoy some time in the sun with a colorful pinwheel. Show your infant how to blow on the pinwheel to make it spin.

– Fun in the grass: Take tummy time onto the grass for some extra sunshine and fresh air.

Toddlers:

– Dirt to mud: Get messy using a bag of untreated topsoil, water, a plastic container, and a variety of cups, spoons, and plastic garden tools. Fill the container with untreated topsoil, and encourage your child to play in the soil with cups, spoons, and other garden tools. After your child has played with the soil for a couple of days, change the dirt to mud! Add small amounts of water until you get a muddy consistency. Invite your child to roll up his or her sleeves and dig in! Discuss how the mud feels different than the soil.

– Texture talk: Grab a bunch of outdoor materials like rocks, sticks, leaves, and blades of grass. Provide a variety of different textures for your child to touch and explore. Touch the different materials, and ask your child about whether the item is soft/rough/smooth, etc.

Preschool:

– Nature investigators: Invite your child to be a nature investigator for the day. Using a small magnifying glass, get outside and take a slow approach to exploring bugs, leaves, flowers, and more. Talk about the way all the elements interact and how it’s important to protect our environment.

– Recycled rainbow: Send your child on a hunt for similarly colored things throughout your home. Gather materials, sort them by colors, and then work on crafting them into the shape of a rainbow using glue and posterboard. Talk about the importance of reusing materials and reducing waste.

Earth Day at Kiddie Academy

Kiddie Academy teacher with students
Across the country, our Academies will be observing the occasion in many ways, including:

– A gift for you and the planet – Putting in trees, shrubs and native plants is a great way to help the environment. We’re partnering with The National Audubon Society^® and Bower & Branch^® to provide plants for our Academies and communities. Find native plants and use discount code KAEARTHDAY for 20% off starting April 1 through April 30, 2022..

– Lessons about the environment – Teachers in each classroom will use units from our Life Essentials^® Curriculum that focus on ways to keep our planet beautiful.

– Planting trees – For the second year in a row, the Kiddie Academy national office will plant a tree on behalf of each of the nearly 300 Academies in the system. One dollar equals one tree planted, so everyone can make an impact! Check out our fundraiser here: support.nationalforests.org/KiddieAcademy

We can’t wait to see how you’ll celebrate Earth Day! Use our hashtag #KAEARTHDAY to share your photos with us!