Egg-cited for Easter! -> aka, why we celebrate holidays in the classroom.

A story of activity based learning-- driven by standards, tied to holiday celebrations our kids hold near to their heart, and ready to fit any grade level:

If you are anything like us, you'll find any excuse to create engagement and excitement with your students by having a celebration in the classroom! Following the secular (and non-secular.. we did teach in a private school, so that was easy for us) holidays are the perfect segue for any celebration in the classroom! Celebrating the holiday season in a school setting is an important way that we teachers can foster connection, collaboration, ownership and understanding among our students. And the sad truth is some students don’t have access to the holiday traditions their classmates enjoy and may feel isolated during holiday breaks. By celebrating holiday seasons in our own classrooms, we can create an atmosphere of inclusion where everyone feels welcomed and celebrated! Not to mention, it gives us the opportunity to explore and recognize more than just the mainstream, traditional holidays!

Now that we have hopefully convinced you to celebrate holidays in the classroom, we want to convince you to integrate those activities into your curriculum! There are some holiday classroom activities that we all know and love. You know what we're talking about- we've all seen it; Christmas around the world, leprechaun traps, Valentines boxes, and so on. We all love it, but they can start to be repetitive, uncreative, aimless, and underwhelming. The tricky part is celebrating the holiday all while continuing to stay on track and continuing current curriculum and standards. So let's start there! Let's take Easter for example...

This year, we knew we wanted to incorporate Easter themes like Easter eggs, bunnies, and chicks into instruction because we knew that the students would feel a connection to those comfort themes, but how do we take these themes and apply it to curriculum while staying on track?

When lesson planning, we do have programs that can guide our daily instruction, but when it comes to themes we like to start with the standards. Very often we lean on writing as a purposeful outlet for themed holiday celebrations. This go around we were working on differentiating between text structures (in fourth grade) and basic paragraph text structure (in first grade)..

--In fourth grade we specifically chose to work with problem & solution for this because we had the perfect idea to match! What if the Easter Bunny had a problem meeting his egg quota for the year because all his Easter chicks retired to the Bahamas?? We decided we wanted our fourth graders to write a three paragraph essay outlining the problem at hand and offering solutions to help the Easter Bunny fulfill his yearly goals.

--In first grade we had an even easier time coming up with a connective idea! We decided to have the students write a creative piece about their own "magical" egg while practicing the basic structure of a paragraph.. topic sentence, details, closing sentence.

And in true Transform Your Teaching fashion we also came up with the perfect hands-on activity to accompany the prompt in order to fire up those brain connections for long term learning. It's simple enough really.. why couldn't WE help the Easter Bunny personally by dying some eggs ourselves? Couldn't WE create our very own magic eggs in real time? In a kid-friendly, non spilly way no less!

So, after we taught, modeled, and practiced our writing lessons, we were ready to incorporate the hands-on learning! We decided to partner our 4th and 1st grade classrooms for the experience. (We highly recommend working with other grade levels during these kinds of activities to reinforce collaboration, enthusiasm, community, leadership and responsibility.)

Our 4th graders helped drive the activity by leading the younger students in the process. Here's how we did it!

--First, we passed out aluminum pie tins with a scoop of whipped topping.

--Then, we spread it out and dropped in splotches of kid-friendly food coloring.

--After we reviewed expectations, we passed out two hard-boiled eggs to each pair.

--The students rolled the eggs around in the whipped topping, coating them fully with dye and cream, and making sure the color saturation and mixture was to their desire.

--Remember... DO NOT wipe off the cream right away! We learned this the hard way many years ago :)

--We wrote students' names in the egg carton holes and had the students place their cream covered eggs in the crevice their name resided.

--The key is letting the egg set! You have to let the egg sit in the colored cream anywhere from a few hours to a day in order to fully transform the egg.

--After washing the eggs off, you will have transposed the colored dye to the shell of the egg! It looks like a beautiful tie-died mess!

Pairing this kind of hands-on activity with an academic easter egg hunt, content driven matching easter egg tops to bottoms, or fiction/non-fiction read-a-louds creates a complete themed day! .. If you're into that sort of thing.. and you know we are!!

Remember, these are the kind of activities that inspire our little learners to make long-lasting connections to content and provides memories that easily spark the retrieval process. This is what makes school memorable, and fun!

So the next time your students express an interest in a holiday.. whether it's a standard commercialized holiday, another culture's celebration, or a simple National Pancake Day.. we say go for it! Tie it back to your standards and let the rest fall into place. You definitely won't regret it!