Learning About Earth Day: Teaching Recycling in Preschool
Are you looking for an easy way to teach recycling to children? Here’s an activity you can do to teach the concepts and language/vocabulary of recycling.
Materials:
- 4 or more clean trash cans or other large containers
- plenty of materials to recycle (plastic bottles, milk jugs, newspapers, glass jars, empty aluminum cans, etc)
- pictures or other labels on the trash cans (depending on the reading level of the children you’re working with
Instructions: After introducing the concept of Earth Day and talking a bit about it, introduce recycling as a way that we can help keep the Earth clean. Have students bring in empty containers, bottles, milk jugs, or other recycling from home and store until ready to use.
Before this activity you can pre-teach vocabulary by having the children cut pictures of recyclable items out of magazines and categorizing them. On the day of the lesson set up four large trash cans with the following labels and/or pictures: paper, glass, cans, plastic. Talk about what materials go into each trash can and let students help you sort a few items.
You can continue letting the children sort items one at a time or you can make it into a fun game by having the children take turns throw the items into the correct trash can. Note: I wouldn’t recommend throwing glass items! 
Feel free to leave the containers out in your classroom for children to get some extra practice in sorting and categorizing objects.
Some suggested vocabulary: recycle, plastic, paper, glass, cans, aluminum, names of specific containers (jugs, bottles, etc), Earth Day, clean, litter, trash
(Please be thoughtful of your states child care licensing laws in regards to glass and empty jars in the classroom. Jars will need to have dull edges and soda rings will need to be clipped prior to placing in the bins.)
