Cinco de Mayo Activities

Que felicidad! 

I know it's still April but Justin has already been running around the internet since the beginning of the month making sure that we all are aware that in just a few days

Year after year, it never gets old 😆

Thanks for the heads up, JT! That must mean that our next seasonal opportunity for some more learning and FUN involves celebrating the rich culture of our neighbours to the south 🇲🇽

If you're looking for ways to share this holiday with your students, I've got some video, read aloud, and activity suggestions for you!

  INFORMATIONAL VIDEOS  

A quick search on YouTube will give you tons of clip options to introduce Cinco de Mayo to your students. To save you some time, here are my two favourite:

This one is perfect for Primary. It's simple and PACKED with fun and informative facts (which come in handy for the flag activity below!). 

This next one is a bit more in-depth in explaining WHY Cinco de Mayo is celebrated. It also includes fun facts at the end. I would recommend this one more for Junior grades.

  READ ALOUDS  

The concept of why Mexican people celebrate Cinco de Mayo can be a challenging thing to grasp, so Cinco de Mouse-O! is a great option for the littlest learners.

Younger students can experience what a traditional celebration is like without the sometimes confusing addition of battles and historical people. If you can't find a physical copy of this book, you can watch the read aloud HERE.

A great read aloud for younger students is Celebrating Cinco de Mayo: Fiesta Time!

It does share about the WHY behind the holiday but focuses more on HOW Cinco de Mayo is celebrated. If you can't find a physical copy of this book, you can watch the read aloud HERE.

  ACTIVITIES  

papel picado

Besides having your own lively classroom celebration (perhaps including chips & salsa, dancing to the Mexican Hat Dance, and decorating with colourful papel picado!), students can get crafty by making their own paper fans:

I LOVE these beautiful watercolour fans! You can whip out your paints or just keep it simple and have students use markers/crayons to decorate their own piece of paper to then fold into a fan. Then turn up the mariachi music and have a fan dance party!

Next up, students will have so much fun creating and working through their own Mexican flag activity book!

You can get the FLAG BOOKLET here.

And who doesn't love a guided drawing?! 

This is my favourite little guy to draw with students:

Do you celebrate Cinco de Mayo with your students? 

What are some of your favourite activities?

Dr. Seuss & Measurement Too!

Well hi there, hello! Happy Dr. Suess week! We read and did math...now let's take a peak!

Okay I promise that's the only Dr. Suess-y rhyming attempt I will make this post...not bad though, right?! Well anyways, in case you hadn't heard, Monday was Dr. Seuss's birthday so we did some fun literacy activities to celebrate throughout the week...

If you follow me on Instagram, you know that I was *super* pumped about my flip book! I've literally spent hours trying to figure out how to make an easy template on the computer so I can just print, fold, and GO...and, by George, I've finally got it! YAY!

I'm excited to share my very first (of many!) flip books with you all as a FREEBIE :) 

From I Can Read With My Eyes Shut! "My favourite part was the crocodile wearing underpants."

From The Cat in the Hat: "My favourite part was when the cat in the hat cleaned up." Ah, a child after my own heart...That fictitious mess gave me serious anxiety!

INSTRUCTIONS: You can print the book 2-sided, but I personally hate running back and forward to our school's printer in order to flip the paper so it prints double-sided. So I just find it way easier to print out each page "as is" and then make them double-sided on the photocopier. 

ANYWAYS, this file gives you full instructions and 3 flip book options to choose from: 

1. with traceable sentence-starter (as pictured above) 2. without sentence starter 3. without sentence starter OR book titles (so you can hand-write any Seuss title you choose and then copy a class set). 

Click HERE to download! Enjoy!

We also started a new math unit this week: measurement! One of the things we focused on was comparing and ordering lengths. As a fun application of this new skill, my firsties completed a little spring-inspired math craftivity:

We are pretty tired of the cold and snow so we attempted to encourage Mother Nature with our beautiful Measurement Gardens :P ...They turned out so cute so hopefully she melts all the snow for us.

(love the deer!)

The kids cut, compared, and then pasted each plant in order from shortest to longest (or from longest to shortest...their choice!). We talked about how, when comparing lengths, we must always use a common baseline, and the kids decided on their own that the grass was the natural common baseline for this activity because plants don't grow in the sky. True story, kids!

Click HERE to download the flowers for the craftivity!

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And without further adieu: bring on the weekend!!

Valentine's & a Skip Counting FREEBIE

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a great weekend and a lovely Valentine's Day on Saturday.

My firsties and I celebrated Vday all week with themed literacy centres from my "Bless Your Heart" activity pack. The writing centre was a particular hit:

The above postcard template is from the Bless Your Heart Valentine Literacy Center Pack

I brought in a mailbox for the kids to "mail" postcards to their friends when they visited the writing centre. On Friday, I delivered each postcard by stuffing them in the bags that the kiddies made for their Valentines (you can kind of see their love bug bags along the back counter in the pic below)...but I secretly read each one first ;) Some of them were super cute: from the traditional "you ar a rili nis frend" and "I like you," to "my favourite culr is blue. Do you like tacos?" haha!

In math, we dove a bit deeper into skip counting and practiced our skills with this super simple cut-and-paste skip counting book:

I snapped this pic of their in-progress books when my firsties took a break to go to gym. The mess gave me serious anxiety but it was the result of little minds hard at work so I managed to pull myself together and resist the urge to clean!

To make the books I just cut 4 long strips of construction paper for each student. The 4 pages featured a cover page (where they just wrote the title "My Skip Counting Book" and decorated it), a skip counting by 2s page, a 5s page, and then a 10s page. 

I had my firsties work on one page at a time. They cut out everything first, mixed up the number cards, and then put them in the correct order in their book.

    

Click HERE to download all three pages of cut-and-paste skip counting for FREE! 

(which also includes another skip counting activity that was featured in THIS POST)

I hope you enjoy this activity with your littles :)

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Get teaching tips, ideas, and FREEBIES every now and then.

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