Spring Is Here!

1. Social Studies

1.1. Cultures that celebrate the spring time: Chinese Spring Festival, Easter, Scotland's Whuppity Scoorie, Russia's Maslenitsa. Children can compare different holidays with each one and develop their own Spring holiday as a class.

1.2. How farmers tend to the earth because it is their job. Leads into agriculture and its industry.

1.3. Talk about the concept of recycling. Teach about the different ways people can help the earth by recycling, reusing, and reducing. Go on a recyling field trip around the school.

2. Science

2.1. Planting flower and vegetable seeds in a clear baggie or plastic cup. Using the Scientific Method, students will mainly hypothesize, experiment, observe, record, refine idea, and reach conclusion.

2.2. Studying the different parts of a seed and plant. Learning the stages of seed/plant life.

2.3. The stages of a butterfly.

2.4. Changes of weather; revisit the four seasons. Teach about different kinds of weather (windy, sunny, rainy, cloudy, etc). Children can make daily observations for 2 weeks and describe the changes by recording them down.

3. Art

3.1. Butterflies (made out of tissue paper and clothespins).

3.2. Creating flowers and plants using scrap paper, pipe cleaners, glitter, and natural artifacts such as sticks, leaves, flower petals, dirt, and grass.

3.3. New node

4. Movement

4.1. I have an activity where children can move their whole bodies while expressing their vocabulary knowledge of descriptive words. When I call out: Boys and Girls, show me a tall tree! Children can stretch their hands and stand on tip-toe while imitating a very tall tree. Plus, their fingers would act like the sharp branches. When I ask for a short tree, they could squat to the ground and hug their knees.

5. Reading

5.1. Read literature based on Spring, planting, baby animals, and new beginnings.

5.1.1. Caterpillar Spring, Butterfly Summer by Susan Hood and Claudine Gvry; Clifford's Spring Clean-Up by Norman Bridwell; Ten Seeds by Ruth Brown;The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle; The Magic School Bus Plants Seeds by Joanna Cole, et al.; My Big Green Teacher by Michelle Y. Glennon; Don't Throw That Away! by Lara Bergen and Betsy Snyder.

5.2. After reading, re-teaching, and practicing, children must retell the life cycle of a butterfly. Use this as a form of assessment.

6. Writing

6.1. Children can write about the different weather changes. Using their drawings, they could write a sentence describing their weather observation.

6.2. Children can write about their favorite season. There can be Author Spotlight and children can showcase their work in the "Author's Chair."

6.3. Writing Prompt: "What kind of a job does a farmer have?" or "How would you help the earth?"

6.4. After the recycling graphing activity, students need to interpret the graph and write about one aspect of their recycling project. For example, they can write about what kind of "trash" they found the most. Which category had the most recycled trash and guess why.

7. Math

7.1. In another project on recycling where students have collected as many objects that can be recycled, the whole class will participate in a graphing activity. They will be handed sticky notes. They need to write down the name of their object. After that, they need to place it under the appropriate category and interpret the graph.

7.2. During a project on and reusing objects to make them into something else, students could sort out the different kinds of objects they could re-use. After they sort each object, they need to count out how many are in each group. After they create their re-usable object, they need to count how many re-used objects they have included.