Mardi Gras Activities for Kids

January 31, 2024 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

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.

Next Plan Idea:

Mardi Gras Classroom Party Ideas

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Sun Activities for Kids

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

Next Plan Idea:

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