Earth Day

Happy (Belated) Earth Day!

As my 6th graders finished up their Andy Warhol Inspired Portraits I had them use their free time to honor Earth Day.  We've all seen the paper pinwheels on pencils and I saw this as the perfect occassion to make them!  Since it was a "finished early" activity, I simply explained why we were making them and allowed students to decorate them however they wished.  Not everyone had time to make one, so I only have about 40 pinwheels in total.  We used the template shown below, a thumbtack and none other than the infamous No. 2 pencil.  Unfortunately my template was rather large compared to the pencil so they can't actually spin/move with the wind...Oops!  But that didn't stop me from planting them firmly in the ground outside my classroom window.  While they might not be spinning as planned, they are still a beautiful accent and a glorious reminder of how beautiful our planet is!

I think if I were to redo this, I would use longer sticks (rather than pencils) and use papers left behind at the school printer so that we could recycle the unwanted copies into something beautiful!