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This year’s Earth Day Illustration Contest was our biggest yet, and we are thrilled to celebrate the incredible creativity, care, and environmental awareness shown by students across the country. We received nearly 8,000 illustration entries this year, almost double last year’s approximately 4,000 submissions. Expanding the contest to include additional grade levels clearly helped drive participation, and the excitement from classrooms was felt every step of the way. Even more encouraging, teacher feedback continues to be overwhelmingly positive as educators use these articles to spark meaningful conversations about conservation, ecosystems, and protecting our planet. This year’s contest featured 13 National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) articles, and every single article was actively used by educators and students. The most popular article was “Monarchs on the Move” for 7th grade, which reached 1,998 educators and generated 2,886 Assignments. Across the month-long contest, we saw:
“As a middle school science teacher, I have been utilizing ReadWorks to support my students’ reading skills as we make our way through our life science curriculum. As a visual learner myself, I try to take any opportunity to enable students with a similar learning style to share what they have learned artistically. When I saw that ReadWorks was hosting their Earth Day Illustration Contest, I shared it with my students and encouraged them to enter. Steven is a strong science student and an incredibly gifted artist, and I was thrilled to see the artwork that he created. I was even more impressed by his words describing the process of learning about the challenges of the herring as they journey to spawn. Steven truly took the opportunity to connect science concepts with creativity in a meaningful and personal way. I loved seeing all my students take ideas about protecting the environment and communicating scientific understanding and transform them into thoughtful, original artwork. Opportunities like this help students recognize that science is not just about memorizing facts, but also about observation, communication, and expressing ideas in different ways.” - Teacher: Crista Tiboldo A huge thank you goes out to our partner The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF), and the volunteers from Jefferies who helped review and judge nearly 8,000 illustrations in an incredibly short amount of time. Your support made this celebration of student creativity possible. And now, congratulations to our winners!
To every student who submitted artwork, every teacher who participated, and every classroom that joined us in celebrating Earth Day through reading and creativity: thank you. Your illustrations showed not only artistic talent, but also empathy for wildlife, ecosystems, and the world around us.
We are already looking forward to next year’s contest!
1 Comment
Judy
5/21/2026 01:31:54 pm
What lovely artwork! This is such a great idea - to combine a literary text on nature with an art project highlighting how to protect it! It reminds me of the Christmas cards that now King Charles but then Prince Charles used to create using artwork from children throughout Britain on How to Save the Rainforest. It was called the Prince’s Rainforest Project - and it would actually make a very good text for students to read about. Leave a Reply. |
