Earth Day Recycling Activities for Kids + Free Printable

Kids can celebrate Earth Day and learn how to reduce, reuse, and recycle with these FREE Printable Earth Day Recycling Activities.

We used our Paper Plate Earth Craft as a visual aid to learn about the importance of recycling, reusing, and reducing in preparation for Earth Day on April 22nd. This is a perfect hands on lesson that will have your child sorting and cleaning up the Earth. I have included some free printable recycling signs to make this activity easy to set up and fun to do!

Earth Day Recycle, Reuse, Reduce Sorting Activity + Free Printable

Children need to learn the importance of taking responsibility to keep our Earth clean. I love how making our own Earth craft dirty and messy with trash became a personal problem for us to fix. Little Tiger (age 4, preschooler) was thrilled to remove all the trash to see her Earth sitting nicely on the table again all sparkly clean. By the end of this activity we knew that recycling meant taking something old and turning it into something new that we could use again, that garbage goes into landfills and makes the Earth dirty, and we learned that recycling can help to reduce the amount of garbage in landfills and keep Earth clean. See all of our activities here: Earth Day Activities

Earth Day Recycling Activities

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Supplies:

Gather paper, plastic, metal, and glass garbage (we used glass
gems to represent glass garbage because we didn’t have any glass bottles on
hand).

Page 3 of the Earth Day Recycling Activity Printable (Available towards the bottom of this post)

Sorting bins

Paper Plate Earth Craft or picture of Earth

Directions:

Set up: cut out the recycling signs from the Earth Day Recycling Activity Printable and tape them to the sorting bins.

1. Have the
child place garbage on top of their Earth Craft. Talk about how when we throw
things away in the garbage, it can end up in landfills and make the Earth
dirty.

2. Remove the garbage from the Earth craft by
sorting it into piles of paper, plastic, metal, and glass. Talk about how
recycling can help keep the Earth clean (Recycle, Reuse, Reduce).

See more: Earth Day Activities by clicking here

We watched these videos on Youtube about garbage processing, landfills, and recycling by Pearson Biology, by Wasatch Integrated Waste Management, by SunnyvaleRecycling