This Earth Day craft for kids helps illustrate that the effect doing something to or for the Earth in a big or small way can spread quickly. One small drop of consideration will bleed into the lives of others and our planet. Okay maybe this is giving a simple Earth Day craft too much power. Maybe not.

Children  seem understand on the need to take care of the Earth. They can have deep and passionate feeling about recycling, litter, and clean water. My son sure does. Sometimes I slip up and am absent minded about putting recyclables into their bin in the garage.  JDaniel’s just shakes his head. It is so not what I have taught him we should do.

JDaniel and I talked about these topics as we worked on creating coffee filter Earth Day crafts.  The craft really does lend itself to discussion of the effects of one or two people on the Earth.

We started by putting blue and green watered down food coloring into bowls. The thought was that the watered down food coloring would flow more easily. Although undiluted food coloring might have given us bolder colors. If you try this at home you might want to try it with and without water.

We used eye droppers to squirt the food coloring onto the coffee filters. If you don’t have eye droppers available to you, you could try using small spoons or a turkey baster. The turkey baster may give you larger squirts of color.

Our watery food coloring flowed through and across the coffee filters we were using.  The green food coloring flowed over and around blue coloring to create earths with water and land blended together.

We ended up with a lot of food coloring pooled on the coffee filters. When we lifted the filters up the pools disappeared.  Several times we moved the filters to a new spot on the newspaper before continuing to work on our Earth Day crafts.

The weather was warm and sunny the day we made these Earth Day crafts. We set them outside on the deck on clean dry newspaper and they dried in minutes. The coffee filters held the bright colors of the food coloring and got a little stiff. They were just perfect for displaying on the refrigerator.

We were both amazed at how different each Earth Day craft turned out. Some had larger landforms (green areas) and some had much more blue watery areas. All of them had blurry areas where the two colors flowed together.

Here are some more Earth Day Activities you will love:

Recycling Truck Number Puzzles

Recycling Bin Counting Activity

These Earth Day books are fun to read on or before Earth Day.

Here are some Earth Day themed Toys and Activities:

If you are looking for more Earth Day activities to do with kids, you may want to check out my Earth Day board on Pinterest.

How does your family celebrate Earth Day?