Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 this year, but Earth Day is not simply one day; encouraging our children to invest their time and practices in protecting our planet can be done at any time.
This year, why not get started by celebrating Earth Day as a family. Every year, a billion people take part in Earth Day activities to help protect our world. Focusing on deforestation, pollution, and more, we can celebrate our planet as well as protect it. Here are a few ideas to get your family thinking about their environment.
Connect With Nature
Whether it’s planting spring bulbs in your back garden or going for a hike with your kids, we can easily connect with nature. This Earth Day, spend the day outdoors exploring everything our world has to offer. Why not start a vegetable patch, plant a window box, or take a walk through a meadow to appreciate how the world grows and reacts around us?
Turn Out The Lights
Turn out the lights and have dinner by candlelight. This can spark the conversation about why we need to protect nature, actively make changes to work together to shape the earth's future and understand how we can personally and as a family tackle the climate crisis.
Eat Fresh
Planning a meal together that only uses locally grown, fresh, and organic foods is a tasty conversation starter about how we can choose our foods. Think local when sourcing eggs, breads, cheese, and meat. Using in-season fruits and vegetables, buying from farmers’ markets, and prepping our meal together as a family can help us to think about the impact our food sources have on the planet.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Have a home clear out by actively thinking about what we need. By minimising waste, reducing what we can, and recycling as much as possible, we can nurture our planet by not buying more than we need.
Go Where The Wildlife Is
To help our kids understand and appreciate the world around us, we can observe animals in their natural habitat. Take to the hills, the mountains, the valleys, and find the wildlife. Find your way to a wilderness area such as the National Park and see what you can spot. From deer to insects, our world is full of wildlife.
Get Arty
Instead of taking out the paints, why not use natural pigments in your art. Using oil, eggs, milk, or tree sap to bind your paints, nature can give us an entire rainbow of colour. For blue use blackberries, blackcurrants, or blueberries. Try mustard powder, pumpkin, and bee pollen for yellow and to make red, beetroot, strawberries, cranberries and rose petals will give you vibrant colours.
To learn about more ways you can get involved, visit the official website for Earth Day 2022.
