Your GREEN PAGES 45 Skill-Building Activities You Can Use Right Now!

Teaching Pre K-8, May 2004 by Swartz, Elizabeth

PRIMARY GRADES

A Tower of Lunch

1 HEALTH Use the children's natural love of towers to teach about the food pyramid. Make a large cardboard pyramid and ask the children to attach pictures from food containers in each of the categories. Could the class build a real tower of food? Why or why not? Could they use empty food containers and build the tower with everything in the correct places? Why do there have to be more foods in the category at the bottom? Make a pyramid of colored blocks with each color representing one food category.

Patterning with Pasta

2 MATH Spray-paint several different pasta shapes with different colors. Design a pattern with the pasta shapes and glue it onto poster board. Have students continue the pattern. Give each student enough pasta with which to create another design for someone else to continue.

Bulletin Board Zoo

3 SCIENCE Design a large bulletin board to look like a zoo, with sections for birds, reptiles, mammals, etc. Have students collect pictures of animals from magazines and catalogs, then invite the children to put the animals in the correct section of the zoo. Set aside some sharing time when students can add new pictures of animals and tell what they know about those animals.

Days into Weeks

4 POETRY Teach your students this poem to help them learn the days of the week. Note that our poet has taken some poetic license - Sunday is actually the first day of the week!

Days Become Weeks

For every week that passes,

These days make up a part,

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,

Is how each week does start,

Thursday, Friday, Saturday,

Then follow one by one,

'Til at last comes Sunday,

And then the week is done.

by Martin Shaw

A Wild World

5 ART In acknowledgment of Maurice Sendak's birthday on June 10, design an exhibit with vines, palm trees or moonscapes in which to place drawings of "wild things" created by your class after sharing his famous book, Where the Wild Things Are (HarperCollins, 1988).

Wild Storyboard

6 LANGUAGE ARTS Using the characters created in the previous activity, have each student lay out a storyboard of six or eight squares. Write and illustrate a story on the storyboard.

Slithery Friends

7 READING/SCIENCE Read together the following poem.

Little Worm

Little worm,

Little worm,

What do you do

When a springtime robin

Is stalking you?

Little worm,

Little worm,

Where do you hide

When the summer sun

Makes it hot outside?

Little worm,

Little worm,

Where do you go

When cold Autumn rain

Turns into snow?

by Heidi Roemer

Collect books and articles about worms. Divide a bulletin board into quadrants for the seasons and show what happens to worms in each season.

Fantastic Flowers

8 ART Fold five pieces of 6'' × 9'' colored copier paper accordion-style to make a six-inch fan. Scrunch together one end of the fan and staple it to hold the fan shape. Staple all five fans together in a circle. Cut a circle from shiny paper, wallpaper or an old greeting card and glue it in the center to hide the place where all the fan ends are joined together. Staple the flower to an oaktag background, add a stem of construction paper and a flowerpot cut from old scraps of fabric or wallpaper. Have students label the plant parts and add seeds to the center.

Sliding Thermometers

9 SClENCE/MATH/ART Make thermometers out of white drawing paper with a slit at the bottom and the top into which you can place a slip of colored paper. Mark the thermometer in increments of two, five or 10 degrees and use positive as well as negative numbers. Use the thermometers in large group math work, use them on a bulletin board, etc. Each student can write a paragraph about his/her own favorite temperature.

Bit by Bit the Flower Grows

10 SCIENCE/SEQUENCING Have each student fold a piece of paper into four sections. Glue a flower seed in the first section. Discuss what the seed needs in order to grow. In the second section, draw raindrops falling onto the ground and, in the third section, a sun shining onto the little plant. In the fourth section, draw a flower and label its parts. In a variation, use each section to draw the cycle of the plant by showing the seed, the seed with roots, etc.

Retelling Fun

11 READING Provide flannel and/or felt scraps for students to use in making setting, character and plot symbols to use when retelling a story on a flannel board. Children can work in teams or pairs to prepare and present the retelling of your latest reading story, using their fabric symbols.

Leather-Look Pencil Holder

12 ART/LANGUAGE ARTS Cover a clean frozen-juice can with torn pieces of masking tape. On each one of the pieces, students use a black crayon to write adjectives that describe their fathers. Paint the entire can with brown shoe polish or brown tempera paint and let it dry. Send the pencil-holder juice cans home for Father's Day, along with student-written poems that include the adjectives written on the can.

The Best Present Ever

13 WRITING Model this activity by bringing in a gift that someone gave you. Show the gift to your class and write about it on the overhead. When, where and from whom did it come? What makes the gift so special? Have you had it a long time? How do you care for it? Invite students to bring in a special item of their own to show to their classmates. Ask the students to write about the item, describing it and discussing what makes it special.