Mardi Gras Learning Activities for Kids

Mardi Gras is about more than beads and King Cake. There’s a lot of symbolism to the celebration, and it marks a day of fun before the reverence of Lent begins.

There are a lot of different ways to incorporate Mardi Gras learning activities into your classroom, from crafts to reading books to learning a little French. Here are some activity ideas to get you started.

JDaniel4sMom wrote a post about decorating masks, making a bra graph and using beads to make a Venn diagram (that’s my favorite!).

Kids Activities Blog has a great collection of Mardi Gras activities, including links to masks and crowns, recipes, a shoebox parade float and a lot more.

Add a little Mardi Gras to your snack time with this “beaded” necklace made out of Twizzlers from No Time for Flash Cards.

Elemeno-p Kids has a Mardi Gras printable pack with handwriting activities, counting, matching and more, as well as a fun collection of Mardi Gras books for preschoolers.

Painting with Mardi Gras beads is a fun sensory experience and process art project. Where Imagination Grows shows you how.

The Handprint Mardi Gras Mask from Fun Handprint Art is another fun choice for a mask project. Add beads and feathers or just draw on it.

Learn more about how Mardi Gras is celebrated around the world, the religious meaning of the holiday and some fun ways to celebrate Mardi Gras in French class (or anywhere else) at the FluentU blog.

Do you celebrate Mardi Gras with your kids? I’d love to hear about the activities you do!

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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