Celebrating Mardi Gras in the Classroom

A lot of Mardi Gras crafts and activities are great for younger kids, but they leave older kids out of the fun. This post from Teach Hub talks about the history of Mardi Gras and offers educational ideas that older kids can do.

Yes there’s still mask decorating and crafts made with beads of course, but it also has some ideas for learning and presentations (real world and virtual) that kids can do to share what they have learned.

My favorite idea is a bit of a STEM extension: have kids or pairs of kids make their own Mardi Gras parade floats. I’d made this an upcycling challenge where students have to use a shoebox and a bunch of random materials (including Mardi Gras beads, of course) to make their floats.

I’d love to hear your ideas for doing Mardi Gras in the classroom with older kids!

[Photo: Grafixar via morguefile.]

Next Plan Idea:

Mardi Gras Activities for Kids

Giving math a holiday twist is fun for kids of any age, but little ones especially will have more fun learning math concepts when there’s a bit of Christmas involved. Check out more Christmas math activities for older kids here.

Teaching Mama has a great set of printable Christmas activities for preschoolers, most of with have some connection to math. There’s connect the dots, repeating patterns, counting, color by number, number puzzles and more. And it’s totally free!

Practice counting by making candy canes with pipe cleaners and beads. This is such an easy activity and a great idea, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before. Get all the details from Nurture Store. You could also turn these into little wreaths or other holiday shapes if you want.

Print out the counting mats from Living Life and Learning, grab some festive little pompoms or other counters (Christmas erasers, coins in red and green, whatever you have handy) and kids can practice counting numbers from 1 to 12 and working on one to one correspondence.

Preschool Play and Learn has a similar idea using Christmas tree shapes, but these don’t have spaces for you to add the decorations, just numbers for the number to add to each one. These are meant to be playdough mats, but you could also use pom poms, beads or even miniature Christmas ornaments to decorate your trees while you count to 20.

Or try these printable Christmas number puzzles from Math Kids and Chaos. The two-part puzzles feature a number on one side and the same number of some Christmas-themed thing on the other side. The edges of the pieces only match with the one that’s correct. You could combine this one with a counting activity to have kids count out the number of counters that the numeral shows, then match with the piece that shows that number of things and count them again. The set includes puzzles with numbers one to 10 and ten frames with numbers one to 20.

Next Plan Idea:

Have you read?

Leave a Reply