"Egg" citing! We can recycle with art!

Our recycling bin was getting full, so I decided to use the scraps of construction paper to decorate an Easter egg.  I accidentally made too many copies of the Easter egg for a different project, so we used all of the paper to prep us for talking about Earth Day when we get back from Spring Break.

Maybe I dumped our our recycling trash can on the floor in a pile...After I did this, I thought to myself, "Why didn't I just nicely lay the paper in a pile on the back table?"  Once I started the mess, the kids picked out colors that they wanted to decorate their egg with.

They ripped little pieces of paper and glued them onto their Easter egg.

We did this project during "free time," in which the students can have free play in the room.  I called back about 5 kids at a time to work at their desks on the art.  It kept them busy and it also reinforced how we can re-use paper for different projects.  Normally during free time, I have a bin of paper that are extra copies or scraps, and that is the paper they can draw on.  So they were already familiar with recycling paper.

Our craft reinforced recycling in the classroom, and it was a great way to frontload them for Earth Day in a couple of weeks!