Literacy Activities in the Spring for Kindergarten
In the spring, students start to get antsy as the weather warms up. Develop fun spring lesson plans and activities within your classroom to keep students interested and engaged. Using spring-themed literacy activities can help your students learn about this optimistic season.
Other People Are Reading
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Springtime Books
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Find different books that focus on spring. "Mouse's First Spring" is a good introduction to spring. In this book, Mouse sees many different kinds of animals that come out in the spring. Make a chart with your students of the different animals that Mouse finds. Do a shared writing activity on sentence strips where you and your kindergartners write sentences about the book, such as, "Mouse sees a flower." Other good books to design literacy activities around are "Hopper Hunts for Spring" and "When Will it Be Spring?"
Activities to Take Home
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Make paper books based on spring for children to take home. Instruct parents how they can work through this book with their child at home. Give children writing prompts to work on, such as, "When it is springtime, my family likes to..." Have the children write this out with their parents and return the paper, illustrated. Send home a list of spring words and have the child tell their parent words that rhyme with the spring words.
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Centers
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Put cardstock, cut in 3-by-5-inch pieces, in your writing center and show students how they can make signs for a garden. Have the students draw a picture to go along with the vegetable or fruit name they write. In your reading center, add weather books about wind, rain and springtime. Draw matching words on raindrops and have students match up the raindrops that rhyme. If your students need support with their reading, add pictures along with the words or make cards with only pictures.
If you are new to introducing centers within your room, decide upon six stations within your classroom where students can work in small groups on academics in an exploratory fashion.
Whole Group
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In the larger whole group time, there are many activities that you can do with your class that are based on spring literacy. During poetry time, introduce poems that are based on spring and springtime changes. Poetry is an important part of early literacy and works well with theme-based units. Choose a book such as "Rain" by Robert Kalan and read it one time to your class. The next time, invite students to join you in reading the book out loud. Ask children if they have noticed the things in this book. Tell students that this is called creating "a connection to the text."
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References
- Photo Credit spring image by Valery Sibrikov from Fotolia.com
