On April 9th our arrival activity was called "What Do You Think?" We posted sheets of paper around the room with different questions or statements and asked each girl to write on each page what she thought about it. The questions and statements were:
- What interests you about the environment?
- What would you like to change or improve in our local environment?
- We can help the environment by using reusable water bottles whenever possible.
- We can help the environment by using reusable shopping bags whenever possible.
As our craft, we recycled bottle cap into critters using water and pop bottle lids, fun foam, goggly eyes and other left over craft supplies. While this was happening, the girls were taken into the kitchen one patrol at a time to make Natural Lip Balm (1tsp Petroleum Jelly, 1tsp Aloe Vera Gel and 1/2tsp Coconut Oil) which was then poured into individual containers to set and each girl was able to take home her own container of lip balm.
Next, we worked on the Map Your Meal portion of the challenge, which was finished up at our April 16th meeting. We asked each patrol to come up with a dinner of their favourite foods using pictures from grocery store flyers. They then had to figure out where each item came from and how far it travelled to get to their table. We then had a discussion about local foods and found substitutes for the items they had chosen that would still be tasty but can be found much closer to home.
Our final follow-up activity was done on April 23rd, when we made bug houses out of empty water bottles, corrugated cardboard (cookie cases!), paper clips and yarn. The full instructions can be found on the EcoKids website.
