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Teaching your children about taking good care of mother Earth by lessening their carbon footprints and reading children’s books to help save the planet!

Children love nature. Producing a meaningful connection between the environment and kids is easier than it may seem.

So, here are some of the easy, everyday tips parents can use to teach their kids to lighten their carbon footprint:

Start a Garden. Children can have fun, learn new skills, develop self-confidence, and play by spending time in the garden, tending, and growing food and plants. Most kids enjoy being outdoors and love digging in the soil, creating things, getting dirty, and watching plants grow. 

Conserve water. Help your children save water with water conservation tips just for their and their children’s sake. Who doesn’t envision a bright future for their kids? Indeed, you never imagined that water shortage could impact that vision. Drought or no drought, people must all now think differently about how they use water.

Recycle. Recycling is an important concept that teaches kids to care for the environment. It encourages kids to be responsible and show a growing Earth appreciation. It is crucial to identify the three R’s so that children can distinguish three key ways to reduce their impact on the environment:

Reduce – this means cutting back on the waste used in everyday life. For example, reduce waste by teaching children to use canvas bags at the grocery store instead of plastic bags.

Reuse – reuse an existing item in your service to minimize waste. For example, reuse paper for drawing, reuse recyclable materials for crafts, etc.  

Recycle – means when an object can be shredded, melted, or processed to create new raw materials. For example, aluminum can create more cans, while paper and cardboard can be recycled to generate more paper products.

 

Walk or Bike. When your children walk to school (or ride a scooter or bike), they set the tone for a good day. Sometimes distance, weather, and other safety considerations make such “active commuting” impossible. But if your children have less than a mile to travel, they should walk. Here is one research-backed reason why. One study on kids with attention disorders found that just 26 minutes of daily physical activity “significantly allayed ADHD symptoms in grade-school kids.”

Flick the switch. Saving on your power bills in a household relies heavily on everyone getting on board, which means the little ones too! It’s easy to start good electricity-saving habits young. Creating early and teaching your kids about power use means you’ll instill positive values, encourage them to connect their behavior to their environmental impact, and show them how to achieve goals. It might sound like a lot to learn for someone so young, but kids are intelligent little creatures. And, as all parents know, they are often mirrors of our behavior. If you make an effort to save power around the house and make it fun, naturally, they will want to join, too. Choose games, responsibilities, and challenges over nagging when possible!

Meanwhile, teaching children to love and respect nature can also be done by giving them books to read and explore more. A recommended children’s book by Walter Hoge. This unique and earthy tale is reminiscent of William P. Young’s “The Shack” in that it was written to the authors’ children. It serves as a parable that there is more to life than glitter and gold and that sometimes, the places where we get lost are precisely where we need to be. What distinguishes Hoge’s fable is that it excites the imagination and conjures wonderment in the natural world in all its simple complexities. Whatever it is Hoge found in Easter: McEaster Valley, he shares with his readers this: If we respect the community in which we live, take care of our planet, and learn more about its nature, it may well yield clues that will help us live healthier, happier lives.

The most apparent reason for conservation is to protect humanity’s lives and wildlife and promote biodiversity. Protecting humanity’s lives and wildlife and preserving it for future generations. And we can maintain a functional and healthy ecosystem. A task that involves everyone, including the little ones!

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