Today Sarah from Little Bins for Little Hands has an awesome sensory bin to help explore pollution in the ocean. This is such a fabulous way to explore where our trash goes and why it’s so important to recycle and take better care of our Earth.

Keeping Our Oceans Clean

Preschool Recycling Activity & Sensory Play

Learning How To Recycle To Protect Our Earth

I would love for earth Day to be every day in our house. My son is slowly able to understand more about the world around him and has really enjoyed cleaning up the yard with us this Spring. He has managed to point out every single piece of trash he sees on our walks and says we shouldn’t be litter bugs. He is certainly right! He says it makes everything look yucky and yes it sure does! I am super excited to be participating in this Earth Day Series with ALLterNativeLearning this year as a sort of kick off for teaching about recycling at home and protecting our Earth.

Hands On Recycling Learning

Of course, recycling is very hands on by nature and my son is a hands on learning kind of kid. He likes to do, not watch! We still needed to learn about what we can and can not recycle, but I also wanted to show him what happens to something as beautiful as our oceans ponds, and lakes if we don’t take care of our trash the right way! He has already learned that there is more water on Earth than land! I set up a simple sensory activity to go along with this very large book I found , Where Does All The Garbage Go? I set up a sensory bin for water play and gathered items to sort for recycling after we read our book together.

Getting Ready To Recycle!

He loves books! This one showed the mess garbage can make and then shows the simple ways to make a change!

 

After we read about recycling aluminum, plastic, paper and glass, we went through our bin of items together and talked about each one. Why is this one trash? Why can this be recycled?

Garbage Sensory Play

Then it was time to take our beautiful ocean sensory bin and make it a mess to show what happens when we don’t take great care to recycle and throw away garbage carefully. He like to chant we’re not litter bugs!

Cleaning The Ocean Sensory Sorting Activity

Once he had made the ocean a mess, I told him we were going to work to clean it up together by recycling and throwing away the garbage to get rid of pollution in the ocean!

We worked on our recycling memory from our earlier activity and separated the items again. He was so excited to restore the ocean to the beautiful ocean it was before (his words). He then put what we could recycle in our recycle bag and the trash in the trash bin!

Here’s our clean and beautiful ocean for even more fun sensory play!

We love a day at the beach, a clean beach with clean water!

Sarah is mom to Liam, age 4 and author of Little Bins for Little Hands. She is very interested in hands-on play techniques to encourage early learning and exploration. Sensory play is what she focuses on primarily to introduce early science, math, and language concepts.Visit Little Bins For Little Hands for all her great ideas and follow along on Google+, Pinterest, and Facebook!

Hope you are enjoying the Ultimate Earth Day Guide and that you will continue to read more post throughout the month!

How have you learned about pollution in the Ocean?