A New Year, Recycling

Thank you all so much for your expressions of kindness and generosity over this past week. Your thoughtful and creative gifts have been so special and meaningful!
I hope your crystals are growing and that they will be a small and colorful reminder of how love grows in the hearts of these children when tended to with honor, care, and love!
This week we are talking about recycling.

Monday: Food scraps and leftovers. What can we do with these? It's good for our earth to try not to waste things. We will make recycled art!

Tuesday: Have you ever wondered where paper comes from? How can we make more trees? How can we reuse paper? Old paper can be turned into new paper. Today we will make our own paper!

Wednesday: This week we will celebrate New Year's Day. Do you know what year it will become?
We will make noisemakers!

Thursday: People can save their used paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, and metal and recycle them into new things. We will sort recyclables today.

Friday: The new year is a great time to think about our daily routines and see if we would like to change anything. What things can we do each day to make our work easier? (lay our clothes out before bed, set the table before meals, clean up our mess right away,etc.)

This week we will be also making Potato Paper, recycled noisemakers, and finding lots of creative uses for old things!

Nature Walk Verse:

" You look around on your Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first born birth,
And none had lived before you!"

"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."

Books we will share together:

Garbage and Recycling by Rosie Harlow and Sally Morgan
Why Should I Recycle? by Jen Green
Where Does the Garbage Go? by Paul Showers
Recycle Every Day! by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace
Recycle: A Handbook for Kids by Gail Gibbons
Eco Art by Laurie Carlson
The Wartville Wizard by Don Madden
Cecil's New Year's Eve Tail by Marie Fritz Perry
Re-Cycles by Michael Elsohn Ross
A Box Can Be Many Things by Dana Meachen Rau
Joseph Had a Little Overcoat
All the Year Round Story that will be told this week - adapted from Emilie Poulsson

Garbage

Pick up garbage, and throw it in the bin!
Push it down, and stomp it in!
Carry the cans to the street
for the garbage trucks to eat.
When the truck comes roaring by,
workers lift the cans up high.
Garbage falls into the back.
Crush it, mash it, smash it flat!
Set the cans down with a thump.
Now drive that garbage to the dump!

Down at the Dump
-sung to Down by the Station

Down at the dump early in the morning,
See the dump trucks standing in a row.
See them dump the garbage
In a great big pile.
Dump, dump, dump, dump,
Watch them go.

Pretty soon our dumps will all be full,
We had better figure out something to do.
We could all recycle
Some of our garbage,
Recycle, recycle,
Watch us go.

This week's reflection: Recycling
"The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard."
-Gaylord Nelson, former governor of Wisconsin, co-founder of Earth Day

"Making wise choices for our planet now, even though the result may not directly benefit you, is the ultimate way to send love back to the life force that sustains and provides for you. The future of our earth is in your hands. What can you do today to make it a beautiful place for future generations?"
-Little Acorn Learning