Quickie CRAFT: SUPER Easy Baby, Toddler, or Preschool Paper Earth Craft for Earth Day or Learning about Space.

Hello! If you frequent Mama Writes Reviews with any regularity, you're probably expecting a Quickie Question, since that's the usual agenda around here. I'm going to make an exception this week! In honor of Earth day, I'm going to do a week of Earth Day related crafts: recycled crafts, Earth related crafts, etc. We will start off with a QUICKIE CRAFT: a Construction Paper Earth. 

Seriously, this is so easy. 

First, gather your supplies. You will need a sheet of green construction paper, blue construction paper, glue/glue stick, and scissors. 

I turned this into one project for both of the boys to do. I cut a circle out of the blue paper and then cut the green sheet in half. 

I gave Cocoa Puff one half or the green paper and let him go to town tearing up the paper into small pieces. This actually is good work for his prewriting muscles and fine motor skill development. 

Then, I gave the other half to Froot Loop for him to cut into small pieces. His occupational therapist is working with him on mastering cutting skills, so this was a good exercise for him. 

Then we put all of the pieces into a bin just to keep them from blowing all over the room since our ceiling fan was on. 

He did a pretty good job of cutting the paper into squares! 

While his older brother was busy cutting his paper,  Cocoa Puff went to work on gluing his pieces onto the blue circle. 

Together, we put glue all over the blue circle and I told him to just put the bits of paper on. 

He had a lot of fun with this, and about halfway through I added some more glue on top of several of the pieces of paper so he could place more on top of it. 

While he was busy working, I told him that we were making an Earth and that the blue represented the water, or the oceans, and the green was the lands. I explained that our Earth has continents and that's what we were simulating in this craft. 

I encouraged him to place more pieces on top of each other so we ended up with larger continents and not just a bunch of tiny islands floating around in a huge ocean. 

Then, it was his brother's turn. I flipped the blue circle over, but you definitely could just cut another one. I wanted them to each decorate a side of our earth so I could hang it from the ceiling. Froot Loop put glue all over it. 

Then he went to work putting his squares on the earth. 

I also talked to him about oceans and our earth. I also got into a little bit about continental drift, which fascinated him. 

We put more glue on about halfway again so that we could make larger continents. 

He continued to add more green squares to his planet. He had lots of questions about Earth and other planets. 

Then, he put his last few on and ran off to play with his train. 

This is what he came up with! We let it dry overnight and it's now hanging in my kitchen window. You could try "silly planets" with different color paper too. 

Happy Earth Day week! 

If you could visit any planet, where would you go?