Recycling Paper, A Scissor Skill Earth, Solar S'mores and a Very Messy Earth Day.

In my usual well organized fashion, I realized last night that Earth Day was today. The timing actually turned out pretty good for us, as we've been studying wind and solar power. We needed to dismantle and clean up our paper wind turbine tower before my folks were to arrive for a visit, so I figured why not combine everything together into a recycling project for Earth Day.

We unbolted and unrolled all of our paper posts (see the wind power unit study posts if you don't know what I'm talking about), and then tore them into one inch squares. We followed the instructions for making recycled paper found at www.pbskids.org/zoom/activities/sci/recyclingpaper.html , except that we added a blender and a little food coloring to the process.

After turning our paper scraps into a blender full of blue mush, we spooned the pulp out onto a piece of tinfoil we had poked full of holes (we had an old towel under the tinfoil). We formed the pulp into a rectangle, and then covered it with another piece of tinfoil, and a few heavy books. Then, we removed the books and the top layer of foil, and set the resulting paper aside to dry.

I had thought about trying to cook a whole dinner in the solar oven in honor of the day, but the sky in the morning was hazy, and I thought we might lose the sun, so I settled for some more s'mores. Our picture is of our s'mores before they went into the oven. After the marshmallows were roasted, and the chocolate melted, we topped them with another graham cracker.

While we were waiting for our s'mores to cook, and our paper to dry, we did a quick cutting craft for the younger ones. We found the idea and template for the craft at www.dltk-kids.com/crafts/earth/mscissorskills.htm. By the time our little worlds were complete, our s'mores were done.

With tummies full, the children wandered off to watch Wall-E, leaving me with a colossal mess. Next year I think I'll have the children weave rugs out of plastic shopping bags for their Earth Day craft, then at least I'll have something to sweep the mess under!

It's great to be a homeschooler!