Category Archives: Going Green
How to Turn Your Kids into Environmental Ambassadors
Later, hotter summers and colder winters prove that global warming is a real issue. The impact of this will affect those we care about most- our children.
In 2020, working toward protecting our environment and global warming has never been more important. We should, every day, be doing our bit to help to protect, sustain and care for our natural world before these irreversible issues take hold too quickly.
As adults with children, it is our job to teach them about the damage being made to the planet- a vast topic to understand, but a valuable, lifelong lesson to learn.
Here are some of the things to teach our kids about the environment, and how they can care for the world around them.
What areas Should You Cover When Talking to Young Children About the Environment?
Children are very receptive to life lessons. They will be highly influenced by the people around them- friends and family, and will want to start doing some of the same things as them. If they see you recycling, then they’ll want to know how and why they should do that and want to get involved.
Some topics of conversation to help to engage your children with environmental issues should be: deforestation, global warming, recycling, and endangered animals. Talk to them about how some of the smaller changes and habits they engage in now will help them to make an essential impact for the future generations.
Help them to understand the ways in which they can help to save electricity and water around the home such as, turning the tap off when it’s time to brush their teeth, and to unplug items when they are not being used, as well as turning off the lights when they leave a room.
Here are Some Fun Activities to Help Children to Understand the Importance of Caring for the Environment
- Invent craft projects using items that would usually be thrown away- for example a jar for pasta sauce can be used again to hold trail mix snacks, or painted brightly and turned into a pencil pot.
- Get outside in nature. Visit a nature reserve, a farm or a national park and help them to point out all the wildlife they see. Why not create a finder mission activity where they can tick off each animal or bug that they see. You can laminate an activity sheet and have them circle pictures with a dry wipe marker so they can be used again.
- Read articles and listen to talks about the environment. Stephen Troese has a wide range of these that are accessible for most audiences. You can read some before speaking to your children to get a better understanding of this area yourself.
- Create a small compost box to keep outside. Teach children the items that can and cannot be collected in the food waste tubs, and have them watch these items decompose to turn into compost.
- Use the compost to plant their own vegetables. It’s exciting to watch a seed begin to sprout and then turn into something recognizable as something to eat!
How To Set A Green Example To Your Kids
If you care about your kids doing the right thing, and you care about the planet, then you are probably going to want to find some way to make these both coincide. That essentially means that you are going to be looking into some of the ways in which you can hope to set a green example to your children, and that is something that might be easier than you think. In this article, we are going to discuss some of the best ways you can do this, so that you are more likely to help the next generation cope with the demands of the world when they grow up.
Build An Eco Home
Everything starts at home, and when you are trying to set an example to your children this is certainly the place to do it. If your children grow up in a home which is distinctly ecological, and which is clearly doing its part in helping to keep the planet going strong, then they are automatically going to understand and appreciate the importance of that way of living. So one of the best things you can possibly do for them is to build an eco home which they and you can live in, and in so doing to ensure that they understand what it is that makes it ecological. You should find that this makes an enormous difference to how they think about the world, and it can only be a positive effect.
Teach & Research
The more you know, the more you can pass on to your children while they are young, which in turn helps to give them a head start when it comes to being green. So you might want to spend some time doing some research around the whole issue of climate change, just to make sure that you are clued up on it as well as you could be. Then you can spend some time home-teaching your children about its importance, why we need to be taking action now, and what it is that they and you can do to help things along. The more you do this, and the more they hear it directly from your mouth, the more engaged they are going to become about the whole issue. If you can start them young with that, they are going to have much more chances of helping to change the world.
Recycling, Energy Use & More
Finally, remember that it’s all those daily actions you carry out which really matter, and which they are going to watch with intrigue. These are the things that affect your children’s behaviour, so make sure that you are always remembering to do the essentials: that means recycling as well as possible all the time, being sensible and conserving your energy use, and all those other little things that we know add up to make a huge difference. If you can instill these behaviours in your kids now, the world might stand a chance.