Need some fun Earth Day writing activities to do with your students on this important day? I’ve got you! I’ve come up with some interesting Earth Day writing to do with my kiddos that will help them engage with the topic of taking care of the environment. I love to get my students to write about important subjects and really think about it. Let me share what I do!
Every year on April 22, Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. It is now a day of action to change human behavior and create global, national and local policy changes. These kids are going to be in this world longer than we are, and so they have a stake in taking care of the planet. Let’s see what they have to say about it!
Earth Day activities
Some fun Earth day activities for students include:
- Summarizing the history of Earth Day in a piece of written text or in a spoken report. Use this website. Get them to use the 5W and H questions and find the key facts of the article.
- Getting them to create posters advocating for ways to help the environment. Remind them what conventions posters have, like a certain layout, pictures, colors, etcetera.
- Writing a letter to a politician asking for action on policy changes. Help them remember what a good letter looks like and how to write a formal one. Get them to be really persuasive so that the politician will do what they want.
- Writing a speech advocating for politicians to change policy. Tell students about the persuasive devices (repetition, alliteration, the rule of three, emotive language) and get them to use those devices. Then have them give the speech out loud to the group.
- Creating a brochure for people to read about things they can do against climate change in their daily lives. Remind them what a brochure looks like. It should be colorful, have a front cover, headlines for different topics, bullet lists, etcetera. Make it really enticing so that people will want to read it and do what it says.
Grab this PDF of these exercises to give to students and have them choose from.
Earth Day writing prompts
Here are some useful prompts to have your students answer regarding the topic of Earth Day. You could also use them as discussion questions for small group conversations.
- Why should people recycle?
- Why should we save the environment?
- What are the things you could recycle in your own home?
- What other things, besides recycling, can your family do at home that would benefit the environment?
- What do you think is the worst thing people can do for the environment?
- What things could families buy for their homes that would be an investment against climate change? How would these things benefit the environment?
- If you could make politicians do anything you wanted with regards to policy changes against climate change, what would you make them do?
- What could your school do to help the environment?
Earth day persuasive writing prompts
You could use the aforementioned questions as Earth day opinion writing prompts and get students to write a short piece stating their view. Tell them to state their opinion clearly and give lots of examples to back it up. When everyone is done, they could read their piece to the whole group as a speech of sorts. If you have students that know about persuasive devices, like rhetorical questions, alliteration, the rule of three and repetition, you can also have them use those.
So I hope there’s an Earth day writing activity in here that you think your students would enjoy! I love that there is a day dedicated to our Earth. Let’s not let our students forget about it!
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