Earth Day may have come and gone, and with it the volume of amazing ideas across hundreds of blogs for celebrating and teaching kids about the environment. But the motto “reduce, reuse, recycle” is an easy concept for even young kids to understand and one families and classrooms can have fun exploring all year long.

Along these lines we recently constructed a “Blueberry Mass Race Car Track” using various cardboard boxes we had in the garage. The kiddos and adults alike enjoyed playing “engineer” and thinking about how best to build roads and bridges for our cars.  Inspired by a post over at Celebrate Everyday with Me, we created some elaborate tunnels for our cars.  We highly recommend this fun recycling activity!

Materials:
Black paint
Yellow sticky notes or electrical tape (we used both)
Paintbrush
Container for the paint
Lots of cardboard boxes
Scissors or Exacto knife
Matchbox cars (race cars)
Tape

We made roads by:

1^st cutting the cardboard

2^nd painting the roads black (or placing the tape directly on the cardboard)

3^rd adding yellow dotted lines by using little yellow sticky notes –reinforce with extra glue.

4^th constructing bridges and ramps in the same way.

I am (truly!) eager to keep building more roads, buildings, bridges with L. and her friends. Let us know how yours come out (pics and links welcome!) I look forward to hearing if you enjoyed the hands-on building as much as we did!