This activity is appropriate for: preschool - kindergarten / 3 - 5 years Encourage students to use their holiday gift boxes for a few hands-on math activities: Large to Small—Gather a few boxes of varying sizes and have students arrange them in order, from largest to smallest or smallest to largest. Mix & Match—Take some boxes of different sizes and shapes and separate them from their lids. Then challenge students to match each lid to its correct container—as fast as they can! Quantity Count—Tape a blank note card to the inside bottom of several boxes. Label each note card with a different numeral. Then have students place corresponding numbers of classroom objects or small toys inside the different boxes. Cash & Carry—Have students cut out pictures of toys from a favorite catalog and place them in a box along with the price of each item. Then set up a “store” and have them select a few items that they would like to buy. Have students take turns being the cashier and the customer. Give them some fake coins and bills with which to practice purchasing and counting out change.
This activity is appropriate for: preschool - 2nd grade / 3 - 7 years Take your students on a “Leprechaun Hunt” for St. Patrick’s Day! Before the hunt, cut out and decorate this adorable leprechaun template with glitter and sequins. Hide the leprechaun in the lunchroom or cafeteria at your school. Next, cut apart these clues and distribute them to the various clue locations throughout your school (e.g., library, principal’s office and playground). Note: If you need to change the location of any of the clues to fit the circumstances at your school, don’t forget to modify the text of the clues accordingly. When students arrive, begin the Leprechaun Hunt by reading the first clue aloud to them. Invite them to guess where they should look. Then, as a class, walk to each location, reading the clues as they are revealed along the way. After the class has found the leprechaun, provide students with a copy of their own leprechaun to color, along with the poem to practice reading at home!
This activity is appropriate for: 1st - 5th grade / 6 - 10 years Earth Day is April 22nd! Celebrate our planet with these engaging Earth Day ideas: Read All About It—Set up an Earth Day reading corner with interesting and age-appropriate books, such as Earth Day—Hooray! by Stuart J. Murphy, Let’s Celebrate Earth Day by Connie and Peter Roop, and Earth Book for Kids: Activities to Help Heal the Environment by Linda Schwartz. Invite students to read the books (or you can read them aloud to the class) and discuss ways they can help preserve our planet! Plant a Plant—Provide students with small terra-cotta pots and paints to decorate them. Then help students put soil in the pots and add seeds so they can grow their own plants! Remind students that planting trees and plants helps preserve the natural environment of our planet. Eco-Friendly Lunch Challenge—During the month of April (and throughout the rest of the year as well), encourage students to bring their lunch and snacks in reusable containers instead of disposable plastic or paper bags. Have students help you estimate the number of bags the class is saving by investing in reusable containers! Save-The-Planet Posters—Set up a center with markers, posterboard, construction paper and stickers, and have students make Earth-friendly signs. Encourage them to write slogans such as “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!” and “Keep our planet clean!” Post the signs around the school for the month of April! Pennies for the Planet—Invite your students to join in a nationwide effort to promote conservation efforts by contributing pennies (and other spare change) to Pennies for the Planet. Click here to learn how your class can get involved in this environmental effort by the National Audubon Society.
This activity is appropriate for: pre-k - 1st grade / 4 - 6 years This activity helps students to feel proud of their names…and familiarizes them with the names of their classmates. It even provides an opportunity to practice essential math skills with a colorful bar graph! Begin by asking students to think about their names. What’s special about their name? Were they named after a family member or a close family friend? Ask them how they would feel if someone called them by the wrong name. After you’ve discussed a little bit about why everybody’s name is special to them, read the story Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes. Ask students to describe how Chrysanthemum’s feelings changed throughout the story. How does she feel about her name at the beginning of the story? What about the middle? How does she feel at the end? Why did her feelings change? Then ask students to count the number of letters in Chrysanthemum’s name. On a piece of posterboard, make a classroom bar graph of the number of letters in each student’s name. Who has the most letters in her name? Who has the least?
This activity is appropriate for: 1st - 6th grade / 6 - 11 years If you want to show students how their ideas have grown and changed from the beginning of the school year to the end, the Class Time Capsule activity is perfect. Print the Class Time Capsule worksheet, and give each student a copy. The worksheet gives students the opportunity to first describe the highlight of their summer, then predict what the coming school year will be like. Collect all the worksheets. Fold them and place them into a “time capsule.” (You can use anything from a shoe box to a plastic storage container.) Place the time capsule in a safe place somewhere in your classroom. On the last day of school, hand out the students’ worksheets so they can see if their predictions were right!
