Hopping into Easter Activities for Your Classroom

Celebrate Easter with these fun literacy and numeracy activities:

Easter Quick Writes

Celebrate Easter with your class by writing about it. Included in this bundle are five quick-write tasks. You will find an Easter Vocabulary chart, Religious Easter Vocabulary chart, a List graphic organizer for the perfect basket, an Easter paragraph template, an Acrostic poem template, an organizer to draw a Map and write directions to the Easter Bunny, a Comparison Graphic Organizer on Easter traditions, a transition word list and writing paper. These tasks are perfect for a bulletin board display or even a big class book. 

Easter Quick Writes

Easter Word Work

Silly sentences have always been a fun way to explore sentence building and recognizing parts of speech. Students in grades 3 through 6 will have the opportunity to use subject, verb and complement cards to build and simplify silly sentences. Challenging verb cards are included with this unit as well as nouns associated with the Easter theme, a blank sentence building template, display and label cards and a synonym chart. This is a perfect activity to use in your Word Work Stations or as an extra project for early finishers.

Easter Word Work

Easter Math Stations Grades 4 to 6

Celebrate Easter with this fun Easter Math Stations pack. You'll find three activities that focus on basic operations, word problems and fractions for a grade 4 to 6 classroom. Activities include "Eggs in a Basket", "Easter Math Scoot Game" and "Easter Fractions". In "Eggs in a Basket", students are taught to generate three digit numbers and will multiply them by 12 or 10 to keep a running score. "Easter Scoot" is based on word problems that involve basic operations (with regrouping), money and time. Scoot cards are included for 25 to 30 students. The "scoot" cards can be used as task cards as well. The "Easter Fractions" activity allows students to derive ways to create fractions based on a given number of jelly beans. This pack includes directions, playing cards, scoreboards, multiplication table, scoot boards for 25 to 30 participants, word problems and answer keys.

Easter Math Stations Grades 4 to 6

Easter Math Games Grades 2 to 4

Enjoy Easter with some fun math games. Three stations are included in the pack. Activities include: Draw the Easter Bunny Math Challenge, Bump Games and Race to the Easter Egg. The Draw the Easter Bunny Challenge includes 2 versions (addition and multiplication). Students are asked to generate sums or products and then draw the Easter Bunny according to each sum or product generated. The first person to complete his or her picture is declared the winner. You will also find Bump Games using both addition and multiplication boards as well as a Race to the Easter Egg game that involves generating place value digits from 0 to 99. This is a great way to celebrate Easter with a math games day or a home-school connection.

Easter Math Games Grades 2 to 4

Easter Writing Paper

This package includes Easter writing paper for your Writing Station. A selection of writing paper for emergent and established writers includes images of a bunny, lamb and a chick. 

Easter Writing Paper

Easter Roll a Story

Students will be prompted to tell or write story with an Easter theme. This unit includes a story prompt sheet, graphic organizers, word lists (Easter & transition words), rubric and specialty writing paper with full and half lined pages.

Easter Roll a Story

Here's a free download:

Easter Gift Tags

Spring Ahead Activities for Your Classroom

Now that Spring is on the horizon, it's almost time to put away the clunky boots and heavy jackets.  I won't miss the endless piles of rocks that trample through the doorway or salt stained pants and boots.  Here are some fun activities that your students will be a hit while celebrating warmer days and sunshine.

Start prepping for a Poetry Cafe (Poetry Month is just around the corner).  Here's some helpful hints:

1) Begin reading different poetry forms for inspiration.  I often use several organizers to introduce forms such as Haiku, Quatrains and Cinquains.  Students then write their own.  I encourage the use of Literary Devices too.

2) Create a portfolio for poems.  When students feel they have chosen two or three they'd like to recite, have them practice with a buddy.  This will certainly help when I launch the Poetry Cafe in April.

3) Encourage voice projection.  Students are encouraged to read across the room to their poetry partner. They can project their voice. Then the partner moves to the halfway point of the room. Voices are then projected to the halfway mark.  The partner moves close enough (within an earshot) for the last reading.  Voice projections are important.  I start with a warm up such as "Today is a wonderful day."  Students were encouraged to showcase their best voices. 

Here's the Spring Poetry pack I use to encourage my students to write:

 2)  Add some Spring Math Games to the mix. Three games are included in the pack. Activities include: Draw the Butterfly Math Challenge and Race to the Birdhouse (place value & odd/even sums) . The Draw the Butterfly Challenge includes 2 versions (addition and multiplication). Students are asked to generate sums or products and then draw the butterfly according to each sum or product generated. The first person to complete his or her picture is declared the winner. You will also find two variations of a Race to the Birdhouse game. The first one involves strategically placing numbers between 0 and 99 on a place value board. The other involves generating odd or even sums through addition practice.

3) For your fluent readers, enjoy some Silly Sentences for Spring. Silly sentences have always been a fun way to explore sentence building and recognizing parts of speech. Students in grades 3 through 6 will have the opportunity to use subject, verb and complement cards to build and simplify silly sentences using a Spring theme. Challenging verb cards are included with this unit as well as a blank sentence building template, display and label cards and a synonym chart. This is a perfect activity to use in your Word Work Stations or as an extra project for early finishers. 

4)  For those students who love to write, here's are some fun templates in the Spring Writing Paper pack. This package includes spring letter writing paper and lined paper for emergent and established writers. Art work created includes a frog, bird, butterfly, bee, birdhouse, bunny and flowers. Bonus gift tags included.

5) Students can explore a fun writing activity with this Spring Roll a Story.  All you need are the printables and a number cube.  Students will be prompted to tell or write story with a spring theme. This unit includes a story prompt sheet, graphic organizers, word lists (spring & transition words), rubric and specialty writing paper with full and half lined pages. 

6)  Here are some free downloads for the Literary Devices Posters I created. This pack includes posters for Alliteration, Hyperbole, Metaphor, Onomatopoeia, Personification and Simile. A spring vocabulary list is also included to assist students when exploring literary devices. They're a great way to support writing about spring:

Check out this blog post on how I create a Poetry Cafe in my classroom:  Poetry Cafe in the Classroom


Happy Spring!

The Benefits of Math Games

Math games allow students to practice computational strategies, one-to-one correspondence, sequencing, place value, and patterning just to name a few.  I often begin a math unit with a quick math game to provide a peek of what the unit will be exploring.  Each unit also ends with a fun game.

For example, this past week I was working with students on the measures of central tendency:  mean, median, mode and range.  These are not easy concepts to understand especially when  needing to generate them through stem and leaf plots, double bar graphs, broken line graphs, etc.

I bought a deck of cards and removed all the faces.  We were left with 40 cards.  The numbers were 1 through 10 (ace became a 1).  Each student was asked to draw 7 cards from the deck and then line them up in order from least to greatest.

Here's an example of numbers drawn:

2 - 6 - 7 - 7 - 9 - 9 - 10

 I created a small chart for them to follow. It looked like this:  

                                                                        Mean:

                                                                        Median:

                                                                        Mode:

                                                                        Range:

                                                                        ----------------------

                                                                        Total:

For each set generated, students would determine the mean, median, mode and range and then add the scores up.  Where there was more than one mode, I encouraged the students to choose the higher one.  The student with the highest score won that round.  The students played for 5 rounds.

Games like this allow students in groups of 2 or 3 to play.  Many of them loved the game so much that they wanted to play it again. 

I have created some of my own games for students to play.  They involve strategy, critical thinking and development of computational fluency.  Games often allow students to access benchmark numbers to generate responses.  

Some of the games include:

2D Geometry Games

Addition and Subraction Games

For a complete math games bundle, this pack includes number cards, time game, decimal game, place value games, basic operations games, odd and even numbers, and equivalent fractions games.  These games are great for a family math night or for a math games day.   

Math Games Bundle