Hi guys!
Can you believe that today is April 9th? And next weekend is EASTER already??
Easter has always been one of my favourite holidays (yeah… I have a bit of a sweet tooth haha), and now that I am a teacher, the love has not stopped. There are so many fun activities that you can do in the classroom to celebrate Easter! I have put together just a few of the things I do with my kinders each year in this blog post.
All of the following activities have been tried and tested by me (and my students, of course!) and work great in kindergarten.
First of all, let’s talk about…
CENTRES
You guys know that I loooove seasonal centres! What better way to keep students engaged and excited about practicing the same skills over and over? Here are a few centres that we have in our current rotation. Just click on any of the pictures or links to see where you can get them!
My students love EEK! In this version, they have to collect as many letters as they can before the Easter Bunny arrives. To collect a letter, one partner rolls a die. If they can correctly identify the letter that corresponds to the number they roll, they get to keep the card. But, if they roll an EEK!, all of their cards go back in the deck!
2. Fine motor colour sorts
I grabbed this idea from Pinterest this year. It is from Little Bins for Little Hands. A sweet parent sent in a big egg carton for us, and I provided the plastic eggs and pompoms. I just chucked everything into one of our fine motor bins, but I love how Little Bins for Little Hands used buckets!
3. Easter Bingo
I don’t usually have Bingo as a centre, because my students are in groups of two. But, I still have a couple of students struggling with vocabulary, so I will play Easter Bingo with them during our small group time (sans chocolat, haha).
4. Trouve, tourne et tamponne!
These are new in my store, but a huge hit in my classroom! I will play this game with my other guided reading groups. Each set includes game boards for letters, beginning sounds, sons composés, syllables, and more – so I always have something for each group to practice!
We also have a few other Easter games and activities out for centres right now, including Youpi!, les Phrases fantastiques, Écris la salle and C’est moi l’espion, as well as our Easter word wall cards for the writing centre.
ART
We got started on our art last week, because I had so many projects I wanted us to do!
1. Easter bunny directed drawings
This directed draw is from Proud to be Primary. It’s free, and the kids loved it! To make the pastel colours, we just mixed our regular liquid paint colours with white.
2. Eggs, eggs, and more eggs!
We have a bit of an egg theme going on for our other projects ;). Painting eggs (real and paper) is a great way to practice a variety of techniques!
We started with these simple pastel and watercolour eggs. We drew the eggs (freehand), divided them into sections, and then I showed them a variety of patterns they could choose to decorate their eggs. They could also invent their own. We traced our pencil marks with a Sharpie, and then coloured our eggs using oil pastels. Finally, we painted over the whole page with watercolour (disk) paints.
They love how it is like “magic” that the pastel resists the paint and still shows up!
After oil pastels, we moved into chalk pastels. This was only our second chalk pastel project of the year, and was a lot more involved than our first one. To get us ready, I let my students practice with the chalk pastels by drawing anything they wanted the day before on plain black paper.
I think they did a GREAT job on their eggs!!
To make these, I cut out two ovals from old file folders for each student. They placed them on black construction paper, and when they had the placement/orientation they liked, they traced them in regular pencil. We added stripes, zigzags, or other types of lines (in pencil). We also added some lines for grass.
Then, during centres that morning, instead of pulling reading groups, I pulled three students at a time to trace their pencil marks using bottled white glue. It works best if you remind them to keep the orange glue nozzle touching the paper!
You could do the gluing with your entire class at once, if you have enough glue bottles. None of them really needed any help – but we usually use glue sponges, so I only had three bottles!
The glue took all day to dry, and for best results, I would recommend letting it dry overnight. The glue dries clear, so it just looks like raised black lines – almost a stained-glass window effect. Then just get your students to add colour with chalk pastels. We started with the sky (various shades of blue + white), then did the eggs (any colours they wanted), and finally finished with the grass (various shades of green). I showed them how they could blend different colours together with their fingers – it was a huge hit!
(And a huge mess ;) Maybe don’t do it the same day as parent-teacher, like I did. Ha!)
On Thursday, I will have each student bring in two hard boiled eggs that we will dye. We will add designs with oil pastels before dyeing them. I find them easiest to dye in the big red Solo cups. I buy my dye kits after Easter each year for like 25 cents and save them for the following year!
EASTER EGG HUNT
Let’s be honest – the best part about Easter is hunting for eggs! You can do that at school, too… and even make it educational ;)
I type up a simple, four-word sentence for each student. Then, I cut them apart (including the punctuation). An example of a sentence would be something like “Marissa joue avec Saryn.” or “Brogan a un chat.” I hide each word in a plastic egg, along with a jelly bean or Easter gummy. Each student gets five eggs, if you put the punctuation mark in its own egg. Then, I hide them outside! You could also hide them around your classroom, if the weather isn’t cooperative.
Here is a picture of my students hunting last year:
So that my students know which eggs are theirs, I close them using a piece of Washi tape with their name on it. We practice what to do if you find someone else’s egg… aka NOTHING, because it is no fun if someone else tells you where all your eggs are!!
AND, IN CASE YOU MISSED IT LAST YEAR…
I have two FREE Easter colour-by-sight-word worksheets in my Free French Resource Library! They are in the seasonal/holiday section.
(Don’t have access to my library? Don’t worry! It’s easy. Just CLICK HERE, enter your email/name below, click the pink button, and I will email you the top-secret password right away!)
