Earth Friendly Valentines Day Gifts/Lessons

I have a four year old (almost) that informed me I was hurting the Earth because my car was running while I was getting him and his sister buckled up and things loaded. He told me I was making the Earth hot and not feel good. So you can see that my lessons in Global Warming are sinking in and starting to bite me in the butt. I told him he was right and I turned the car off until we were ready to go. Now Valentines day is around the corner and I'd like to continue my lessons on being Earth friendly. In our home we're continually talking about how mommy teaches others about being healthy and taking care of "Mother Earth" because of what I do for a living. My years of education and schooling (early childhood degree) tells me he needs to make a connection and be able to relate to all of this "green" talk.

February 14th in our home is a perfect time to show my little guy that he can use things we have in our home to make gifts for his friends and also a gift for daddy. Dad's a Valentine's baby so we also have a birthday to celebrate. Dusting off the old collection of teaching ideas I came up with a few great ideas I've used in the past and some new stuff. The idea behind this is to teach my son that we love the Earth so much that instead of throwing stuff in the trash and it sitting at the landfill we are going to recycle it and make something useful and give it to daddy and our friends and family to make them happy and smile.

Weathered, tried and true old Valentine Teaching Staples of Mine....

• Take my old greeting cards, wrapping paper and misc. craft supplies and make our own Valentines. This is fun because it teaches recycling but also practices fine motor skills for cutting.


• Use a tin can and cover it with old wrapping paper and wrap a pretty box around it for a pencil holder. Grandma's love this.


• Take an old picture frame and puzzle that's missing pieces. Glue the pieces around the frame and put a picture of the child in the frame. This is great to use with buttons too! Craft glue works best for this activity.

New and improved ideas from internet searches....

• Floppy Disk Picture Cube (Perfect because I never know what to do with these old things).


• Photo Busines Card Holder from a cassette tape holder (a must do for the dad or mom with a desk or office).

Just a few ideas of the upcoming holdiay and ones that we will be trying in my home this February. Teaching our kids about how to be Earth friendly and take care of the Earth often comes from conversation and example but the children need to actually make connections for the real learning to take place. I can tell you right now my son will be explaining to the recipients of his gifts that he was recycling and why!

Plastic Bags Blow!

What a cute saying...."Plastic Bags Blow"! I found this on ReusableBags.com while searching for environmentally friendly holiday gifts (which I promised I would write more about). There's an actually campaign to help stop the use of plastic bags. You can get activist kit with buttons, t-shirt and stickers for only $4.95!!! Wow! What a great thing to get a young teen who wants to have a cause. I can't stand using the plastic bags but do my best to recycle them at our local Wal-Mart or use them for our tiny garbage cans around the house. I'm not as diligent as I should be about using my canvas bags and it has to do with forgetfulness and laziness.

When I started reading some facts on ReusableBags.com I started feeling guilty and now will be buying everyone I know for Christmas some of their very stylish bags. I'm going to use them as my gift bags this year so that I'm not even buying wrapping paper (if I can avoid it). Here are some facts from ReusableBags.com that I urge you to check out....

• Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food.

• Plastic bags are among the 12 items of debris most often found in coastal cleanups, accoPlastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food web when animals accidentally ingestrding to the nonprofit Center for Marine Conservation.

• Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute. Billions end up as litter each year.

• According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. (Estimated cost to retailers is $4 billion)

So here's another great earth friendly, give back and help someone gift idea and a prompt for myself and everyone to stop being so lazy!!!! Shame on me. Make sure you leave me a post and tell me if you use reusable bags or what your thoughts are.