Earth Day Activities -Recycled Planter on a String

This activity combines the desire to plant and grow in the spring with the need to find ways to recycle items from our recycling bin. It was inspired by the book The Adventures of a Plastic Bottle: A Story About Recycling . We don’t have a lot of plastic water bottles at our house. We need to use reusable water bottles for the most part. Every now and then we have some. My husband bought a set off bottle water. My son and I used the plastic rings that came with the set and one of the bottles to make a planter and a sling. I thought you might like to make these some of the Earth Day activities you do with your kids.

Let me walk you through how we completed our Earth Day Activities.  First we made the sling and then we  planted in the planter.

Making the sling:

• Four connected rings were cut out for the full set of plastic rings.

• A long piece of plastic twine was thread through one set of the ring. Then it was pulled up to make sure each side of the twine was the same length.
• The  bottle filled with soil was place in the center of the set of rings. The soil was used to help the bottle stay in place while we constructed the plant sling
• The two ends were wrapped around the mouth of the plastic bottle and a knot was placed in the twine near the mouth of the bottle. The remaining twine was left long and loose to be used later.
• The same steps were followed with the two remaining rings.
• Then the ends of twine were tied together to create a way to hang the sling from a window lock.

Planting a Seed

• We planted flowers seeds that have not come up yet. One seed at a time was dropped down the mouth of the water bottle. A chopstick was used to slide the seeds over and push them into the soil.

• We initially placed a ¼ cup of water into the bottle to dampen the ground and then screwed on the bottle’s cap. Now we add a few drops of water every now and them just to keep the soil moist.

You will find more Earth Day activities and gardening experiments like this  on my Early Learning Science board  and my on Gardening Pinterest. Please take moment to check them out.

This post is part of storybook science series hosted by Inspiration Laboratories. Each day in the month of March a different children’s book will be tied to science project. I hope you will check them all out.