While it can be a hectic time of year (hellooo, spring fever!), there’s also something beautiful about teaching in the spring. The sunshine is lasting longer and everything is starting to bloom…including students! And all of the fun spring activities for the classroom are a highlight for this time of the school year too.
Here’s a round-up of my favorite spring activities for math and ELA. I’ve personally used these with 2nd grade, but these resources can be used or easily adapted for other grade levels as well. And there are ones for each month of the season!
SPRING ACTIVITIES FOR MARCH
Once March hits, bring on rainbow everything!
Shades of Meaning Rainbow Craftivity and Word Sort
Do you see a lot of the same overused word choices in your students’ writing (words like nice, good, etc)? The Shades of Meaning Rainbow Craftivity is a great way to brighten up their writing AND your classroom!
This rainbow writing craft is a helpful visual for students to practice expanding their vocabulary.
Kids analyze synonyms and put them in order from weakest to strongest based on their shades of meaning. Then they record the results of their word sort on their cloud and rainbow craft.
If you’d like to try this activity, you can find it here on my site or on TPT.
Rainbow Roll & Write
This Rainbow Roll & Write activity works well for a Word Work station to practice word recognition and spelling. Students enjoy getting to write in all the different colors of the rainbow!
It’s very low prep- just need the pages shown above and one die per student. If using for a center, you can laminate the pages for re-use.
This Rainbow Roll and Write is part of a 3-game set. Like the shades of meaning activity, it’s in my website shop and TPT store too.
SPRING ACTIVITIES FOR APRIL
These spring activities for 2nd grade are ones I’ve typically done in April. Everything from Easter to Earth Day, and some April showers sprinkled in.
Classroom Egg Hunts for Math and ELA
Egg hunts aren’t just for Easter! I love how versatile those little plastic eggs are for all kinds of possibilities in the classroom. They instantly up the student engagement factor, and get the kids up and moving.
You can create your own, or save time with these pre-made versions for 2nd grade math.
Coin Treasure Egg Hunt
This first one helps students practice counting money. You can use real plastic coins in the eggs, or just have the coins pictured (see below).
Each time they find an egg, students count all the coins inside. Then they match the corresponding number inside their egg to their recording sheet and write down the amount of money they counted. After closing the egg back up and leaving it for another classmate to find, the hunt continues.
Telling Time Egg Hunt
This egg hunt works similarly, except students find a paper with either an analog clock or digital time shown.
If they find a clock inside the egg, then they write down the digital time on their recording sheet. If they find a digital time inside, they draw the hands on the analog clock.
Addition & Subtraction Egg Hunt
Each egg is filled with math problems that students can either solve mentally, or work out on paper. They can even use the backside of their recording sheet as scratch paper. You may also want to provide math tools like white boards, hundreds charts and place value blocks to utilize while they are solving.
Bonus: The Great Egg Hunt Challenge is not only for math, but egg-cellent review for 2nd grade ELA standards too (no more bad puns, I promise)!
An ELA egg hunt can be done in the same way as math, just with standards-based language arts questions instead.
For more ideas on how to incorporate academic-cased egg hunts into your classroom (or to get any of the pre-made egg hunt templates pictured above), visit this blog post.
Earth Day Writing Craft
While Easter may not always be in April, Earth Day is always celebrated on April 22. And this Earth Day Writing Craft is one of the spring activities for 2nd grade that you can always use each year!
The activity combines art and writing, and it will get your kiddos thinking of helpful ways we can take care of our Earth.
Plus, it makes for a colorful, meaningful bulletin board for the month of April.
All of the printables and details for how to make this Earth Day writing craft are in this blog post.
Making Arrays
Rain, rain, go ARRAY…
These spring-themed work mats help teach or review foundational multiplication skills.
Students roll dice to determine which array to create. They can draw arrays on these mats with white board markers if they are laminated (or put in sheet protectors).
They can also build the arrays using any kind of counters. But this hands-on activity is made extra engaging with spring-themed mini erasers! Target often has them in the Dollar Spot section every season, or they’re also sold in bulk on Amazon.
I’ve shared more about these array building work mats in this blog post. The post also contains more ideas for array practice all year round.
Pouring Plurals
April makes me think of rainy days, which is what made me think to create this “It’s Pouring Plurals” activity for plural nouns (a grammar skill often taught or reviewed in the spring).
This spring activity for 2nd grade contains lesson ideas for multiple days.
- Day One: Introductory game
- Day Two: Choral poem reading, plural hunt, tree map sort, and brainstorming session
- Day Three: Craftivity
“It’s Pouring Plurals” includes a poem that teaches all 5 plurals rules, a tree map template for a plurals rules word sort, and an umbrella craft template.
Get tons of tips and ideas on how to use “It’s Pouring Plurals” in this post.
SPRING ACTIVITIES FOR MAY
April showers bring May flowers…and math flower crafts!
SpringTIME Flower Pot Craft
This math craftivity provides telling time practice with an analog clock and digital time. It can be used for telling time to the hour, half hour, quarter hour, or five minutes. Students draw the minute and hour hand on the analog clock. You might also choose to have them count by 5’s around the numbers on the clock to show the minutes.
And it makes for a beautiful spring bulletin board too. You could use a headline like, “Happy SpringTIME” or “It’s TIME for Spring!”
The craft and the bulletin board letters are available altogether in my website shop and TPT store.
Butterfly Life Cycle Writing & Craft
With flowers come BUTTERFLIES! This activity integrates multiple subject areas (reading, writing, science, and art).
When doing this activity with students, I’ve usually liked to start with a read aloud about butterflies. It just helps get their wheels turning before beginning the writing process.
You might have students explain the steps of the life cycle of a butterfly in an informative paragraph. But the writing paper could be used for other genres as well (narrative, opinion, etc.)
To go along with the writing, this flow map craft is a hands-on way to reinforce science concepts.
I’ve often hung these up in the classroom for Open House in the spring. The students’ work has gotten so many compliments from parents, administrators, other teachers, etc.
Read this blog post for the butterfly craft tutorial, and to get the templates pictured above.
Got any questions for me about any of these spring activities for math and language arts? Spring into action (okay sorry I lied, THAT was the last bad pun!) by leaving a comment below.