We wouldn’t forget “Earth Day” in our vast category of “holidays”. April 22 is a special day for us to reassess what we can do to help our planet. Smarty Symbols is filled with excellent vocabulary whether you are wanting to discuss the life of our planet (using our “plants”, “animals”, “birds”, “mammals” and “marine life” categories) or discuss the more abstract elements (using our “science”, “weather”, and “nature” categories), Smarty Symbols has the symbols you need from the simplest to the most complex words.

Reduce—It’s time to take action against behavior that is wasteful of our resources: and that is why our “action words” contain words like “turn off”, “turn water off”, “turn off TV”. Reducing waste is even better than recycling because energy is used in recycling. Let Smarty Symbols help your “reduce” your stress; we have the images you need!

Reuse— when a material is durable it can help us reduce waste by reusing it into something else . You’ve probably seen some cool ideas on Facebook, Instagram, or Pintrest of everyday objects turned into something spectacular. The internet is just overflowing with these kind of ideas and it just takes a few minutes to find some inspiration. Sometimes a simple Google of the word “reuse” and then the object name will bring up tons of ideas. (E.g I typed in “reuse corks” and immediately found 1001 ideas for this). Smarty Symbols can be a great way of making a chart for this to show students; have the symbol of the old material on the left, then and arrow pointing right to a symbol of what can be created from that material.

Recycle—know what you can and can’t recycle. What can be recycled varies from place to place. What better tool than Smarty Symbols to make a visual of what can appropriately be recycled? Sometimes a school may only be able to recycle cans, bottles and paper while at home the local city recycling company will accept a much wider range of things. Sometimes things get wasted just because people didn’t know they could recycle that object.

For the office — a simple sign to “Turn off lights” when leaving the room. Sometimes in community areas we simply forget to conserve because we assume someone else will enter that space shortly, but every minute of energy and every drop of water count.

For the school— craft ideas for “reuse”. What better way to celebrate Earth day than to make

something new with something that was about to be thrown away?

For the home— Do your kids know everything that can be recycled? What about you? Our recycle bin from our particular city has a long list of examples on the lid (but no visuals). A visual created using Smarty Symbols could go a long way into helping prevent unwanted materials in the recycle bin and more recyclables inside it!

We have created a simple Earth day free downloadable worksheet for all of our Smarty Symbols subscribers. It’s a great starting place to see some of the vocabulary we have, and we hope it gives you inspiration to create even more great materials. You can download it here:

Be sure to share photos of your creations and tag us on Facebook, Instagram and Pintrest. We love seeing what our subscribers have created and this is often how we decide to feature a work of a particular subscriber in our newsletter.