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!

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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