Spring

April is an exciting month, filled with special holidays. From Poetry Month to National Jelly Bean Day, these occasions provide an opportunity to engage kids in unique learning experiences. The seasonal activities in this packet will ensure that your students are on task and learning even as the warm weather beckons! You'll find several pages of directions followed by more than 2 dozen pages of printables.

Jelly Bean Egg Challenge is a sweet statistics lesson that requires students to measure, estimate, collect, compile, and graph jelly bean data in order to analyze it and draw conclusions.Give each student a plastic egg filled with an assortment of jelly beans, and let the fun (and learning) begin!

Easter egg activities aren't just for little ones! You might not take older kids on an Easter egg hunt, but you can bring colorful plastic eggs into the classroom and jazz up any review activity using this Easter Egg Showdown freebie!

Easter Egg Showdown is a cooperative learning review game that can be adapted to almost anysubject area. Activity cards are included for Division Showdown as well as Subject/PredicateShowdown. Problems or questions are placed inside of plastic eggs. Students in teams of 3 to 4take turns choosing eggs for the team to use during the activity.

How do you encourage your students to write longer, more interesting sentences? You know what will happen if you simply them to write longer sentences... they'll just add more words to the end, resulting in long, rambling run-ons! After struggling with this problem myself, I developed a three-step process to help my students turn boring sentences into super sentences. I began by teaching them the difference between fragments, run-ons, and complete sentences. Then we practiced revising and expanding basic sentences to make them more interesting. After I modeled the activity and they practiced it in a whole group setting, they played a game called Sentence Go Round in their cooperative learning teams. The difference in their writing was dramatic! Before long, they were adding more detail to their sentences without creating run-ons in the process.

Sometimes kids think our Earth has unlimited resources and they don't realize that only a small part of our planet is habitable. Edible Earth Rounds is a tasty activity you can use to demonstrate this concept, and it's a great way to sneak in a fraction lesson, too!

Do your students have trouble writing interesting sentences? If so, use these spring-themed task cards as starter sentences for them to expand with details. These sentences go with Sentence Go Round, a resource which includes complete directions and printables for the activity. You can also find the directions on Corkboard Connections in my article, Teaching Kids to Write Super Sentences.

How to Teach Kids to Love Poetry (Even If You Don't) - Explore engaging ways to teach your students about poetry! You'll be amazed at how quickly they are able to read, write, and understand poetry... and even more surprised to discover how much your students come to love poetry, too! Most of the activities Laura will be sharing were designed for upper elementary students, but many can be adapted for younger or older students. Even if you haven't enjoyed teaching poetry in the past, you might find yourself actually looking forward to your next poetry lesson!