Spring has Sprung!

No ears required to be festive!

Spring has come and there are a lot of great activities you can do with your students to celebrate springtime!

1. Spring means the Easter Bunny! Even if you don't celebrate the holiday you can use this fun song to practice body parts, animals, and adjectives. Interested? Check out the sweet little bunny!

2. You can practice some prepositions, and get your students moving by dancing the to the Bunny Hop

3. Working on emotions with your students? This free printable involves a fingerplay and coloring pages with an egg theme (perfect for Easter).

4. Have your students practice using more precise words AND decorate your classroom with flowers with this Fun Flower Activity. (pictured to your left)

5. Have little ones work on the different names of plants (stem, petals, etc.) with this game / chant, "Oh No, Poor Flo."

6. Flowers mean bees! Here's a bunch of bee idioms


7. Earth day is coming up! Grab a free book with TONS of water ideas. Some resources are on conserving water, others on the water cycle. Lots to do!

Those are seven awesome activities that work well with spring. What's your favorite activity to use in the springtime?

Oh No Poor Flo!

Spring is here! Well, for those on this part of the world it is. In honor of this season I have made a quick PowerPoint / activity about Flo! This reviews the parts of a plant for beginning students using a flower named Flo.
If you want to practice more skills you can have your students practice introducing themselves to Flo and asking how she is. 

Poor Flo from Carissa Peck

It is VERY similar to other activities better suited to other seasons such as the winter Oh no Poor Snow and the original Oh No Poor Joe. In addition to the Powerpoint the last two slides are worksheets you can print for the students to complete on their own.

If you prefer to use YouTube here's a recording of me reading the PowerPoint (it is also included at the end of the SlideShare presentation)

Gradients of meaning

Here's another activity linked to Am I Small?

If you have your own classroom here's a fun bulletin board project! Give each student a a paint strip (you can get them for free from your local hardware store: Home Depot, Lowes, etc.) Paint strips have recently gained popularity in crafting and are no longer used as samples. As a result some stores are charging. Rather than take the samples from the paint display, ask the manager if they have any expiring paints that you could grab the sample sticks for when they expire. Or, if they have any expired paint samples ready to toss. 

Once you found your paint strips, write a "boring" adjective on the bottom (the lightest color) then have them choose their own adjectives that mean the same (or similar) but are more powerful. Have them write these on the darker parts. What do I mean by a boring adjective? This post talks about it in more detail.

You can use the story as an example and make a couple sample paint strips using the words from the story.

When your students finish these make great Spring decorations for a bulletin board, door, or wherever you like! You can put a title on it like: "Keep your language colorful" or "Make the world a more colorful place!" and then fill the board with your students paint strips! 

Here are four different "Rich" cards showing different denotations.

Another option is to explore different meanings of the words. Let's look at the word rich. 

Ask what the word means, then give them different examples.

Or, you can get your students to figure out what the different meanings of rich are. It can mean to be well off, to have a lot of something, have a lot of intensity, to be buttery and thick (with foods), to show irony, to be interesting, to be prolific, etc. Once you have the idea see if you can give them some other words.

Divide the class into small groups and give them each the same word. However, tell them to each focus on a different meaning of the word. To get a good idea of words with different meanings you can check out the two part list here. If the groups are bigger then have two students work on the same denotation, but try to come up with different words.

On the bulletin board make brown or yellow circles that contain the "boring" words. Surround these circles with the finished paint strips so the yellow becomes the center of the flower and the paint strips are the petals.

Let your students know that this is their Synonym Garden! Whenever they want inspiration on better words to use, they can look at the different meanings words have and pick a more specific description.


While I think this project words wonderfully with adjectives you can do it with nouns or verbs too! For example, the word run has many different meanings (you can run a computer program, run for office, run a company, etc.) If we were talking about moving quickly: run-speed-hurry-hasten-zoom-bolt.


I don't currently have my own classroom :( So, I am not able to show you how pretty it looks.

If you manage to do this with your class, I would LOVE to see the final product!