Everyone loves getting a greeting card, especially if it's homemade. Make a funny or thoughtful greeting card or invitation with pictures and a poem, joke, or riddle.
Send a Smile: Make a Card for a Special Occasion
The Natural World as Inspiration: An Outdoor Art Show
Children incorporate materials from outdoors with paints or crayons to create pieces of art to display on their clotheslines, fences, or porches for a neighborhood art show.
Creating Comics and Cartoons!
Using published comics and cartoons as examples, children can create their own while playing with images and language.
Mail Time!
Sort through your junk mail and talk about what you find for a fun literacy activity before recycling it!
Creating Family Timelines
Children can interview family members and make an illustrated timeline of the most important family events and memories.
Exploring the Library
Plan a visit to a library to discover more about this magical place.
Let's Play a Game
Playing board games or card games can be a fun activity, so why not make your own?
Fairy Tales and You
Children will draw on their knowledge of story structure and fairy tales to write their own.
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein was published in 1974.
Students are introduced to a Silverstein verse and asked for their impressions. They then draw that they imagine when they read one of his lines and then write a line or two to continue the passage.
Today is the International Day of Peace.
Students brainstorm a list of current conflicts and why people fight. Groups discuss and present possible solutions and create posters that promote their particular solution.
Mickey Mouse appeared in his first animated feature.
Students create a short, humorous story with at least one action character, and then use online tools to make a flipbook.
Library Card Sign-up Month begins today.
A school or public library librarian is invited to visit the classroom to talk to the students about the advantages of having a library card. Students then take a library tour to acquaint them with the general features and resources available.
Caldecott Medal-winner Virginia Lee Burton was born on this day in 1909.
Students discuss similarities in Burton's illustrations and writing style in her many books, in addition to her use of personification.
The tropical storm that became Katrina formed over the Bahamas in 2005.
As a class, students explore weather-related and other natural disasters that their geographical area is prone to and review emergency preparedness and procedures.
The Smithsonian Institution was founded in 1846.
After exploring an exhibit online, students use the information they learned to write "A Day in the Life" narratives that tell about a person, animal, or object they saw in the exhibit.
Monarch butterflies begin their migration in the fall.
After exploring the ways that monarch butterflies react to seasons, students complete an inquiry study to examine how other things change because of the seasons and create a class anthology.
The first English printer, William Caxton, was born on this day in 1422.
Students consider how the printing press affects their world by completing a printing inventory, comparing lists, and developing a "super" list of all printed materials that they interact with.
The first woman swam the English Channel in 1926.
Students brainstorm a list of famous athletic competitors and establish criteria for what makes an athlete "famous." Students then forecast which of today's athletes will still be remembered in 75 to 100 years.
The prototype for the World Wide Web was created in 1990.
Students look at pictures from the past using the WayBack Machine and brainstorm a few websites to explore to think about how they have changed over the years.
Ernest Thayer, author of the famous poem "Casey at the Bat," was born in 1863.
In small groups or individually, students make baseball cards for the players in the poem "Casey at the Bat." Students can use a word processor or the Character Trading Cards interactive to create their cards.