Earth Day Collage

I saw a fabulous magazine clippings Earth Day Collage at Artsonia and put it on our To-do list for Earth Day this year. All my kids pitched in making this Earth Day Craft, but kids could easily do it themselves. I love how ours turned out!

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Supplies you will need:

cardboard
10-inch cardboard cake board
(optional)
magazines
pencil
glue
mini wooden sticks (optional) [We received ours from Craftprojectideas.com]
paper tag with “This is Me” written on it (optional)

Directions:

1. Start by cutting out a piece of cardboard for your background about 12-inches by 14 inches. For our circle we used a cardboard cake boardbut you could also just cut a circle out of cardboard that is about 10-inches in diameter.

Love drawing things? Learn how to draw a tree!

2. Use your pencil to freehand part of the world onto your circle. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Kids can even look at a map and do this step themselves.

3. Looked through several old magazines and tear out pages that have lots of black, green and blue on them.

4. To start our collage, trace your circle Earth onto your cardboard background then remove it. Tear little pieces of the black colored magazine pages and glued them around our cardboard backing, leaving the circle empty in the middle to put your Earth on.

5. Next get started on your Earth. I knew getting the blue pieces to line up around the countries would be difficult so I helped my kids with this part and just let them know it didn’t need to be perfect. After outlining the countries with the blue torn magazine pages, we added glue in the rest of the water areas and finished putting the water pieces in place. You can see below that my toddler was a big helper.

6. Here is what ours looked like after we were done with the blue water pieces. We did the same process for adding the green land pieces and finished filling in the Earth.

7. After adding the green land pieces, I trimmed around the Earth to cut off any pieces that were hanging off the ends, and then we glued it onto our cardboard backing. It looks so cool! My boys found a page that had a bunch of sugar on it and they glued those pieces around to look like shooting stars. I love it!

One thing we talked about this year was how big our Earth is and how small our town is when we compare it to the size of the Earth on a map or globe. To go along with this theme and with a book we checked out at the library (I’ll show you in a minute), I made this little flag for us to put at our location on the Earth.

My boys helped determine exactly where to put the stick after looking at a globe we have. I poked a little hole in the spot with a small screw driver and after filling it with some school glue, we put the flag in it. I wished we had family or friends that lived in different parts of the World because it would be fun to make lots of little flags to show different locations.

EARTH DAY BOOKS

I always enjoy talking about our Earth to my children and all the different kinds of things we can each do every day to try to help out. Books are obviously a fun way to incorporate learning and these are some that we read this year:

I Can Save the Earth by Alison Inches

Dora Celebrates Earth Day! by Emily Sollinger

It’s Earth Day! by Mercer Mayer

This is Me and Where I Am by Joanne Fitzgerald
(this last one inspired the little flag in our craft)