Recycled Paper Earth Craft

Learn how to create a beautiful Earth Day planet craft using colorful construction paper scraps, showing how amazing our planet is!

I love how Earth Day, on April 22nd annually, has become such a big deal these days! I’m pretty sure it existed as a kid, but it wasn’t treated as a huge event—at least not that I remember. Growing up in West Texas during the oil boom of the ’80s, the main focus (at least from my unreliable childhood perspective) seemed to be making money. I don’t recall hearing much about recycling, saving water, or anything eco-friendly until I was much older and had moved to Oklahoma.

Although it seems ages ago now, I still remember when we were told the impact leaving the tap running while brushing our teeth could have on the environment. Something like 5 gallons of water gets wasted every time you brush your teeth and leave the water running. And why exactly do you need to keep that water going? You don’t.

So these days, when somebody leaves the water running when they walk away from the sink for a few minutes or scrubs and dubs their pearly whites with that water shooting straight into the drain, I tend to give them a piece of my mind. It’s not like I have a small carbon footprint, but I try to be reasonable about what I can. And turning that stinking tap off is a simple start!

Recycled Paper Earth Craft

Today, I’m sharing a project I think little of me would have liked very much. I decided to make an Earth Day reminder of how pretty our little planet can be from construction paper scraps I’ve collected over four years of craft blogging. And while I couldn’t find my old papers (because I just moved, dang it!), this project only took one piece of each color to complete, so I don’t feel so awful about it. But let’s get after it, shall we?

Supplies Needed for Recycled Paper Earth Craft

• Earth image printed (click here or on the image above)
• Foam core board
• Glue stick
• Blue and green construction paper
• X-acto knife

How to Make Recycled Paper Earth Craft

Print your Earth in the size you or your children want to create. I went with a big 12-inch Gigantor, and it took a full episode of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to finish—so plan accordingly!

If you’re making a large planet Earth, you’ll need to piece together multiple pieces of paper. Rather than print four pages, I guesstimated up part of the outer circle to save some paper.

Glue your Earth onto a piece of foam core and cut out using a sharp knife, like an X-acto knife. Now, I used a scrap piece of $1 foam core from the dollar store!

Tear your construction paper into shapes loosely matched to the landmasses (green) and sea (blue) shapes.

Using a glue stick, apply the paper to cover the globe.

Now, isn’t that fancy?

I thought I had an idea of how this would turn out, but in the end, it came out so much better than I had hoped, which is AWESOME!

Whether you’re making these yourself or with a kid, this fun project is an excellent reminder of our world’s beauty and size.

Let Earth Day be our reminder to treat our planet well!