This activity is appropriate for: preschool - 1st grade / 3 - 6 years Use this easy-to-make card game to improve your students’ memory skills. You will need 12 index cards and two identical sets of Thanksgiving-themed stickers (e.g., pictures of turkeys, pumpkins, cornucopias, pilgrim hats, etc.). Thanksgiving-themed stickers can be purchased from a local store or card shop around Thanksgiving time. Place one sticker on each of six index cards. Then make an additional set of sticker cards identical to the first six so that each card has a match. To play the game, players place all 12 cards, sticker side down, on the floor or surface of a table. One at a time, players choose a card, and then try to find its match by flipping over another card. If the two cards show pictures of identical stickers, the player keeps the match. If not, he returns both cards face down. Players take turns playing until all matches are found. The player with the most matches wins! (For younger students, you may want to begin with only three or four pairs of cards. Then as memory skills improve, add additional sets for a more challenging game.)
This activity is appropriate for: kindergarten - 2nd grade / 5 - 7 years Write a nursery rhyme or short poem on sentence strips. Place the sentence strips in a pocket chart. Then have students read the nursery rhyme or poem aloud with you as a shared reading. Invite students to take turns using a pointer to point to the individual words as you read the passage again and again. After a considerable amount of whole-class practice, place the pocket chart in a learning center. Make a second copy of the reading selection on sentence strips and cut out each individual word to make word cards. Challenge students to work together at the center to read each word card and match it to the corresponding word in the pocket chart. Instruct students to place the word cards on top of the words on the sentence strip as they find the match. When they have finished matching, encourage students to read the nursery rhyme or poem together again to check their work.
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: kindergarten - 5th grade / 5 - 10 years This is a great way to help students “break the ice.” Start by cutting string or yarn into pairs of varying lengths; there should be one piece for every student. If you have an odd number of students, take a piece yourself. Distribute the pieces, and tell students that their challenge is to find the person with the string that is the same length as theirs. After everyone has found their match, they should take turns introducing themselves to their partner. You can provide a list of questions (see our downloadable list) to help them “break the ice,” or you can come up with the questions as a group. To extend the activity, invite students to introduce their partner to the class!
This activity is appropriate for: 2nd - 6th grade / 7 - 11 years Children can learn a lot about their new classmates with this fast-paced activity for 2nd–5th grade classrooms. Start by printing a copy of the Getting to Know You Scavenger Hunt list for each student. Pass out the lists, and let students know that they will have fifteen to twenty minutes to approach each other in hopes of filling in the entire list. Some of the items on the list are physical traits such as finding the tallest person in the class, but others will require that students ask each other questions. For example, students must find “someone who went camping this summer.” When students find a match, they fill that person’s name in the blank. The first student to fill in all the blanks “wins,” but you may want to continue the game until many students have completed their scavenger hunt lists. For preschool and kindergarten classrooms, write these questions on butcher paper or chart paper. Meet together on the rug and fill in the scavenger hunt together as a whole class.
This activity is appropriate for: pre-k - 1st grade / 4 - 6 years Preparation: Make your own deck of sight-word cards by printing the First 20 Sight-Words. Mount two sets on cardstock and cut on the dashed lines to make two index cards for each sight-word. The game works best with four players, so you may want to create multiple “decks” so that several small groups can play at once. How to Play: Each player is dealt seven sight-word cards, and the rest of the cards are neatly stacked face down in a pile in the center of the table. As in the card game, “Go Fish,” players take turns asking each other for specific cards to make a pair. For example, Player One may ask Player Two, “Do you have the word ‘the’?” If Player Two has that card in her hand, she gives the card to Player One, who pairs it with the matching “the” card in his hand to make a pair. If Player Two does not have the card she is asked for, she says, “Go fish!”, and Player One must draw a card from the pile to add to his hand. The first player to collect the matching cards to all the cards in his or her hand wins the game!
