4 Activities to Help Kids Learn About Natural Resources

4 Activities to Help Kids Learn About Natural Resources

When kids understand that everything comes from the natural environment, they are more likely to engage in behaviors that conserve resources, reduce waste, and minimize pollution. Here are some activities to help kids practice identifying the resources used to make things they use every day. You can get all of the Think Earth videos, stories, and learning activities on our homepage at https://thinkearth.org/.

• View the Everything Comes from the Environment color poster. Review the poster together, following each resource—shown in the boxes—from where it begins to how we use it in our homes. You can print out the poster in black and white so that kids can color it themselves.

• Play “name that resource.” Identify an item in your home and ask kids to name the resource it comes from—for example, a cotton t-shirt is made from a plant. Or name a natural resource (such as a tree) and ask them to find items in your home made from it (such as a book, a paper towel, a pencil, a cardboard box, a wooden table).

• Make a Resources to Products book. Either on paper or on a computer, create a page for each natural resource: plants, trees, water, animals, metal ore, sand, fossil fuels. On each page, have children draw or copy and paste pictures of products that come from that natural resource.

• Play a resource card game. Print out and cut apart the Natural Resource Cards and Product Cards. Lay out the natural resource cards and have kids match the product cards to the resources used to make them. You can have them make additional product cards showing items you have at home. You can also print out the page “What is it Made From?” for more practice.