Mardi Gras Activities for Kids

Mardi Gras isn’t a holiday that’s necessarily celebrated by a lot of kids, but it’s still fun to bring into the classroom if for no other reason than to bring some color in the middle of winter (beads, masks and cake wouldn’t hurt, either).

If you want to talk about what Mardi Gras is with kids, this video from PBS Kids is a good place to start:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXCucOH4d0A?si=oBjajfW2dDefvbYF]

Mardi Gras is known as a time for parades, music, good food and fun. The colors associated with Mardi Gras are purple for justice, green for faith and gold for power. You’ll often find beads in these colors, or you can add them to your sensory activities this time of year (for example making slime or playdough in those colors). Or make a fun calming jar with Mardi Gras beads inside, with this tutorial from Mom Dot.

These printable Mardi Gras Masks from Kitchen Table Classroom are fun for kids to decorate, and you can wear them as you parade around the classroom or playground.

Homeschool Preschool has printable worksheets with a Mardi Gras theme, including writing practice, color by number and color and count, among others. You can get more color by number coloring pages from Rock Your Homeschool. And Jinxy Kids has a printable Mardi Gras word search.

Pink Oatmeal has cute printable action cards to get kids moving when they need a brain break (or maybe for use in indoor recess?). They include things like balancing, jumping and walking in certain ways to get some energy out when kids are cooped up.

You can also play with Mardi Gras beads in educational ways, as this post from Books and Giggles describes. Use them to form letters, count necklaces of different colors and graph them, make shapes and more!

How do you celebrate Mardi Gras with kids or bring it into the classroom? I’d love to hear your ideas.

Mardi Gras books for kids.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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