Actividades para Easter (English)

Spring and Easter activities for young learners

Despite the terrible weather, yesterday was in fact the first day of spring. But when spring finally does  arrive here in Spain, there will be no better time to get out and about and observe the awakening world around us. Why not take your pupils outside on a search for spring? Give them a checklist to cross off for spotting flowers, green leaves, butterflies and other insects and go outside to explore and observe. You could also take magnifying glasses and containers to collect interesting things to look at and draw later on.

The Easter holidays are coming soon, but what is Easter and how and why is it celebrated? In the past, Easter was a celebration of the arrival of the spring, when the animals and plants come to life again. In Britain, at this time of year, you will see schools and shops decorated with baby chicks, Easter Bunnies and chocolate eggs. You might even see an Easter bonnet parade!

With young children, there are many activities you can do in class to link culture with Science, Literacy, Art, Maths – in fact with any area of the curriculum. You could start by reading or watching a story about Easter or about Spring. For very young children I recommend ‘Spot’s first Easter’ or ‘Spot’s Easter Surprise’ by Eric Hill. For slightly older children, a very nice story about the life cycle of a duck is ‘Ruby Flew Too’ by Jonathan Emmet and of course, it goes without saying that ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and ‘The Tiny Seed’ by Eric Carle are great books for this time of year.

As we know that motivation and positive emotions are a vital part of successful learning  experiences,  an Easter egg hunt around the classroom or playground, using either real chocolate eggs or paper eggs will be something that your pupils will never forget! You could also work on some maths skills by counting how many eggs the children find or by sorting them according to size, colour or pattern.

Then you could encourage creativity by allowing the children to decorate eggs using different techniques, such as paint flicking (using an old toothbrush) paint blowing (using a straw), collage or by creating patterns with spots, stripes, checks, zigzags, stars etc. You could also teach your pupils the song ‘Hop Little Bunnies’ which is great for TPR.

And to finish off your week off Spring/Easter celebrations in a mouth-watering, finger-lickingly delicious way, you could call in some parents to help you with a cookery workshop. Making chocolate nests has always been one of my favourite Easter activities! Here is a video of how to do it . Enjoy!