Easter In my room & around the WORLD!

Happy Weekend everyone!! Whew, what an action packed week it was!

Earlier this week I shared my Easter Stamp-a-Story.  It is a freebie- I hope you were able to grab it! If not, it's not too late.  

It caused quite a bit of chaos in my speech room this week!! 

Apparently there's a serious case of Spring Fever spreading around my school and the kiddos were a bit on the wild side!!!  

 One poor little guy ended up with ink all over his face doing this activity (he didn't really do too well following my hardcore rules for rubber stamp usage:). 

 I couldn't post a picture of THAT but here is just a glimpse of the action my kidney table saw this week!

We also got in tons and tons of articulation drill this week! I have LOTS of IEPS due in March, and it's our final push to achieve those IEP goals!! 

The best $1 (yep, one buck) I ever spent was on this little game called Tower of Bunnies I found at Walmart one year in the holiday aisle (you know the aisle of cheapo basket stuffers).  I see it year after year. Be sure and look for it- It's a great game for articulation or fluency drill.  

I build the tower of bunnies and students take turns rolling the dice to see which color bunny they have to carefully remove (or yank!) from the tower.  Of course, they don't get a turn until I've made them say plenty of target sounds!)  Whoever knocks down the tower loses the game. It also makes all the kids sit very still at my table because they don't want to accidentally knock it down. (a great added bonus:)

Now after school, I do private speech therapy for a Polish family.  Every holiday I get to experience some of their Polish traditions and it has been so much fun being exposed to that culture- it's not something we see much in south Louisiana.  It made me start to wonder how people in other countries celebrate Easter.....I thought it was all egg hunts, chocolate bunnies, spiral hams and Easter mass! Boy, was I wrong! 

That led me to do some researching which then led me to my my newest literacy and language activity for Easter.  I can't wait to use with my 4th grade inclusion class and the 3rd and 4th grade language impaired students that I service.  

I had a blast making it- normally I make activities so that my students can learn but in this case, (and I know it sounds corny) I learned just as much!  People around the world do some weird, outrageous, off-the-wall things for Easter!! 

They really have us beat with our ordinary Easter egg hunts and dyed eggs!!

So anyway, the result was this packet.... 22 short non-fiction passages with critical thinking questions (and other fun stuff) about Easter Around the World.....

The sweet Polish mom that I work for shared with me the Polish tradition of Smingus-Dyngus...

And there are many more! Including our Cajun tradition of using Easter eggs to "pacque."

 
Who knew Australia had an Easter Bilby instead of an Easter Bunny!? 


And that Germans filled their trees with Easter eggs!


People in Norway read crime novels and watch crime series on TV!! 
What ?! 

Besides the 22 passages & questions, the packet includes a writing prompt, a venn diagram to compare/contrast traditions, and 2 board games (with instructions on how to incorporate them with the passages).

...and here's my favorite part- I don't know about your school- but we just don't have enough editing and grammar in our curriculum anymore!! It drives me nuts!! 

So the pack also includes a cute Easter coloring sheet that is "color by editing." 

Students must find errors in capitalization, punctuation, noun/verb agreement, or mistakes like run-ons & fragments (or no errors!) in order to color in the sheet. 

If you want to bring a little culture to your classroom 

You can grab the download HERE 

and if you're already on Spring break instead, I'm jealous :)

Until next time, and may Spring Fever stay away from YOUR classroom, 

-Mia