Your GREEN PAGES: 70 Skill-Building Activities You Can Use Right Now!

Teaching Pre K-8, Jan 2005 by Swartz, Elizabeth

PRIMARY

A Perfect Fit

1 MATH/SCIENCE Decorate three different sized boxes, leaving the tops open. Ask your students to select an object from the table that they think will fit in the first box, second, etc. Then mix up the objects. Select an object and ask a child to show in which box it will fit. Finally, ask for suggestions of other objects in or out of view that would fit in each box.

Dress Me, Please

2 SCIENCE/HEALTH Provide a loveable bear and a box of various clothing. Write the name of each season on a slip of paper and put them in the bear's lap. Have a child come up, select a paper and dress the bear appropriately.

Where Does It Go?

3 MATH Write numbers on small slips of paper, fold and place in a container. Give one to each member of the class. You will draw a slip and write your number on the chalkboard. Select another student to unfold the paper and write that number where it belongs in relation to the first number. This activity can be used with a number line, fractions, decimals, etc.

Bearly Ready For Weather

4 SCIENCE/HEALTH Make a department store window scene in a show case or on a bulletin board. The students draw bears that are dressed for each season or have them dress up bears from home to put in the showcase. Show the seasons in sequence.

Label Happy

5 READING/VOCABULARY Remove the labels from "reading around the room." Pass them out to your students and ask them to put the labels back in the correct places. Or, make another set of labels (cover the ones you have up) and give a label to each student to put en a piece of drawing paper and then illustrate.

Ocean In A Bottle

6 ART/SCIENCE Give each child or group one large, empty clear plastic soda or juice bottle. Lay the bottle down, cut out the back, place sand on the bottom and decorate with sea shells, coral from chenille pieces, drawn and cut out fish, a treasure chest, etc. Then hang blue plastic wrap across the opening to give the illusion of water.

Today's News

7 SOCIAL STUDIES Take your class to www.kidsnewsroom.com/index to see all the news fit for kids with front page treatment of world and national topics explained. Also included are sports, music, entertainment. It even includes a comic strip and colorful graphics. Have your students print stories to report on in class, write journal entries in response to or compare to stories from other sources.

People Patterns

8 MATH/SOCIAL STUDIES Line up the students in some kind of a pattern known only to you. Ask the students what pattern they see - two children with glasses, two without, three girls, three boys, sneakers, shoes, blue shirts, etc. Have students line one another up in a pattern for the others to discover.

Build A Box

9 ART/MATH Enlarge these polygons and provide several sets in various colors for your students. Challenge the students to arrange them so that they can glue them to the sides of a tissue box, crayon box (any small empty box) without leaving any openings. Caution the kids to lay out everything completely before going for the glue.

Tissue, Everyone?

10 READING/HEALTH A new manners book by Lisa Kopelke called Tissue, Please (Simon & Schuster, 2004) is great for sharing during the cold and flu season. Use it as a discussion or writing starter about ways to prevent the spread of disease. Then present each student with a traveling packet of tissues to keep at his or her own desk.

LUCKY SUBSCRIBER

Margaret Hoagland

Plainville, MA

So Many Feet

11 READING/SCIENCE/MATH Read the old favorite, The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss (Random House, 1968). Then trace and measure a foot of each child. Compare and contrast the feet. What can you learn about a person by looking at the footprint? For more comparisons, include footprints of various teachers.

Happy New Year

12 READING/SCIENCE Read the book The Big Cheese For The White House; The True Tale of a Tremendous Cheddar by Candace Fleming (Sunburst, 1999). Then have your students create flow charts describing cheese making. Another fun activity would be to have your students make a map or trace on a map the journey that this cheese made in order to get to President Jefferson on New Year's Day.

LUCKY SUBSCRIBER

Carol J. Craig

Wakefield, RI

Weather Person Needed

13 SCIENCE/WRITING Pretend the local newspaper is looking for a new weather person. Give each student a winter scene taken from a magazine or calendar. Ask each child to write a weather report -based on what is observed in the picture.

Spaghetti Shapes

14 MATH/ART Provide each student with some construction paper, glue and uncooked spaghetti. Review triangles, pentagons, octagons, etc., and have the children "build" them out of spaghetti and glue them onto the paper. One child can do a demonstration with the spaghetti on the overhead.

Great Glossary

15 READING/VOCABULARY Use a single-use or digital camera to take pictures during any unit. Print the pictures and have the class use them to make a glossary of terms for that unit of study. Students can also each make their own glossary of terms.

Yum! Edible Shapes

16 MATH/ART Give each student some cookie dough that is cut in the shapes of triangles, squares, circles, ovals, etc. Have the children identify the shapes. Mix one egg yolk with a couple of drops of food coloring. Make sure that you make enough different colors to correspond with the number of shapes you have displayed. Then, give each child in the group a paintbrush and a job, "Paint three squares blue, two circles yellow, etc." Make all like shapes the same color. You might want to challenge the children by asking if they could create a new color by combining two other colors. Don't forget that you can then bake and later eat the cookies. The same project could be done with papier mache, cardboard or clay, but make sure that no one eats those!