It’s Never Too Early to Teach Your Kids the 3-R’s.

It's never too earlier to take age appropriate steps to teaching your children the 3-R's reduce, reuse, and recycle. As with any childhood lessons, the best thing you can do is lead by example.

Children get many of their clues in life from observation. As my mom once warned me, children may not always pay attention when you talk. But believe me they watch you like a hawk.

With this in mind, the more your children see how important it is for you to live greener they'll soon pick up on the green habits as well. Consistency is the key. The more often they see you conserve electricity by switching off lights or unplugging appliances when not in use the sooner they'll start as well.

Make a game out of sorting the recycling. Use brightly colored bins and give them green stars for sorting correctly. When they get ten green stars, they get a special treat picked by mom or dad.

Let them create art projects reusing things around the house. Printer paper is the perfect reuse item. It's generally only been printed on one side so it makes great art paper.

Reusing coffee or steel cans for storage is a great way to teach the kids about reusing items. They can decorate them for use as pencil cups, toothbrush holders or utensil cups. If the cans come with reusable lids, they make great canisters for flour and other dry goods. Just make sure of course that there are no sharp edges to be cut on.

Once you show your kids just how much fun it is to be green, they'll learn the 3-R's without ever knowing it. And that lesson will make a big difference for generations to come.