Eco-friendly games for kids

Even the youngest members of the family can help protect the environment with a little guidance from parents and teachers. Teaching kids the importance of environmental conservation could be quite hard as they may not totally understand it. But through exciting games, we can effectively make them care for the environment and eventually share the valuable lesson to their friends.

Recycling Match-up Games

It is important to teach kids what is recycling and how it works. First is to teach them to segregate materials whether they are recyclable or nonrecyclable. Test if they really understand the lesson by giving them worksheets with different pictures of things to tell whether it can be recycled or not. The objective of the test is to make sure they know the difference between recyclable and nonrecyclable so even without your guidance; they will be able to throw items on the right place.

After the lesson, you can ask them to recycle things to come up to a new useful item. This could be a challenging project but they would surely enjoy doing it especially if you promise to give a prize.

Waste Relay

Waste relay is a game to be played by two groups. You need different kinds of trash and five bins each for the two groups that are labeled with trash, recyclables, compost, reduce and reuse. Each team will be given items to be separated in five different trash bins. For example, a junk food bag in trash, glass bottles in recyclables, banana skin for compost, grocery plastic bags to reduce, and old books to reuse.

Nature Appreciation Activities

Go for a walk in a park with your kids or students. It is best to conduct Eco-friendly activities outdoor where they can see and touch trees, plants, and water resources. This way they would appreciate nature's beauty. A game called The Tree Friend is an Eco-friendly game that needs two participants. One will be blindfolded and led to a tree by her partner. The blindfolded will touch the tree and will remember its features. After that, the blindfolded kid will be led to the starting point and removed the blindfold and will try to find the tree she touched and say I found a tree friend. If she fails to find it, she will try the game again in order to have a tree friend. The objective is to make them treat trees as friends that should be taken care of.

Online Games

Teaching and learning become easy to do nowadays with the help of technology. You can find a lot of applications on the web that teach kids to protect the environment. Most games are produced by reliable organizations like Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that created the game Mission to Earth, U.S. Department of Energy's Lose Your Excuse, and NatGeo's Earth Day Pack that all have the same objective of promoting environmental consciousness.

Kids should not just be taught on how to be smart and be the best in school because it won't matter if they don't know how to take care of their environment.