Hop To It!

One of my goals as a teacher of young children is to continually find ways to actively engage my students in learning.  I have been quite successful at resisting the temptation of plying my little learners with worksheets and reproduced "busy work".   I want my Kindergarten students to get up and move while interacting with one another!  Worksheets just don't do that (plus most five-year olds are not at the stage where they can sit independently for lengths of time while focusing on tasks which require large amounts of fine-motor coordination).  


This Easter Egg Delivery Egg-stravaganza game is the perfect activity to play with a group of 4 or 5 students during your Center Time or at Literacy Stations.  The curricular objective of the game is for students to match upper-case letters with their lower-case counterparts.  

Before you begin, place a number of "houses" with upper-case letters around the classroom.  Provide each student at the station with a basket full of paper Easter eggs with lower-case letters printed on them (these lower-case letters need to match the upper-case letters of your houses... or else there would be no matching and no point to the game).  The children then hop about the classroom (a sneaky way to work on large-muscle development during language arts instruction) delivering eggs to their correct houses.  I give each of my students a pair of floppy golden bunny ears to wear to really get everyone into the spirit.  Once everyone has finished delivering their eggs, we take down each house and go through the contents to ensure that there were no delivery mistakes.  At this point, to deepen the learning, we also talk about the corresponding sound each letter makes and I ask every student in the group to tell me a word that starts with the letter.  They can look for clues using the colourful alphabet posters that decorate our classroom.  This is definitely a much richer learning experience than an ABC worksheet.


Time Saving Tip:  I write the upper-case letters on the laminated houses with washable marker.  That way, I can customize the letters for the children in each group.  As well, I adapt this game over the course of the year.  In December, the children don Santa hats and deliver little paper holiday stockings to each house.  By February the children are ready to deliver valentine hearts with lower-case letters emblazoned on them.  By providing theme and variation the children think they are engaged in an all-new game while allowing them multiple attempts to practice and eventually master the skill of letter matching.  The possibilities are endless...