Fun Classroom Activities for Fifth Grade

Learning can be enjoyable.

Teaching is an interesting profession, where a teacher meets different students each year and always tries something new to make a lesson more interesting and enjoyable. With all the technology available, there are many ways to introduce pleasurable activities to help children have fun while learning.

Persuasion

Give out a list of around 15 persuasion techniques used by advertisers to sell to the public and how they are used. Put them in groups such as "Bandwagon," "Celebrity endorsement," "Emotional appeal," "Humor" and "Snob value." Ask the students if they can think of advertisements that contain these techniques and why. Discuss how persuasion is used in general and if they recognize when they are using it and it is being used on them. Ask them to create an advertisement using one of these techniques for a particular product.

Pizza Fraction

Print out life-size images of plates and laminate them. Do the same with pieces of pizza. Stick Velcro on the bottom of the plates and the pizza cutouts. Add some placemats, using Velcro to attach the plate. Use the different sizes of pizza to help the children learn fractions.

Weather Around the World

Using a large wall atlas and some colored peelable stickers, choose a color for hot, cold, temperate and rainy climates. Discuss the different countries and cultures with the children and then ask them in turn to put one sticker on a country of their choice of what they think the weather is likely to be.

Celebrities

Print out colored photographs of various popular celebrities (six to 10 images) that the children will know. Also use biographies and personal information on each but keep it hidden. Use a SMART Board for this if you have one. Ask the children to write down what they know about each celebrity, for example: age, what shows they are in, clothes designers used, their partners and their children. Question them as to what they would ask their favorite celebrity if they could meet them. Bring up the personal details of each and see how accurate they were. This tests their memories and will also bring forth some very interesting questions for the celebrities.

References

• TES: Taxonomy

Resources

• BBC Schools: KS2 Bitesize Science Living Things