Send your kindergarteners off for the weekend excited to come back on Monday by using these wonderful fun activities for kindergarten! I know what you are thinking, with all the pressures of testing and making a year’s growth, there is not much time for Fun Friday. Not to worry, here at 4 Kinder Teachers, we make sure that all of our Fun Friday activities for kindergarten are standards based, rigorous, teacher, student and principal approved, and most importantly FUN!! To add some extra excitement, and to keep our kinders wanting to come back for more, we made (almost) every Friday a FUN Friday!
To make these fun learning activities for kindergarten, we would take whatever concept we were teaching and pair a great activity, usually a fun art project or possibly a yummy food creation, with one of our favorite children’s books! Our kindergarteners never wanted to miss a Friday and would go home telling their parents how much fun they had! Here are some of our best ideas for fun activities with kindergarteners. We will be creating a more detailed blog for each of our Fun Friday ideas. Stay tuned for details! FYI these can also be made into fun activities with preschoolers.
Picture Books Make Great Fun Friday Activities for Kindergarten
As I mentioned before, we often planned our Fun Friday activities around a wonderful picture book. Here is one example.
Elmer The Patchwork Elephant by David McKee
Early in the school year we were busy getting to know and appreciate one another. Understanding that everyone is unique and learning to appreciate our differences was something we began teaching every August. Elmer the Patchwork Elephant is one of the books we chose to help our students learn this valuable lesson. We would read and discuss the book, make an adorable Elmer art project, watch the animated read aloud version on YouTube, and find fun music to dance to while marching in an elephant parade. Our students loved it. For more details, read our blog Make it a FUN Friday with these Awesome Elmer the Elephant Activities. Some other books that work well with beginning of the year concepts are The Rainbow Fish, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, and Leo the Late Bloomer. If you want to learn more about making your read alouds great, see our blog 3 Steps to Create Meaningful Experiences Through Read Aloud.
Fun Seasonal Activities for Kindergarten
Seasonal activities are perfect for Fun Friday. For example, in the fall we would learn about why the leaves change color. We would read a book, watch a YouTube video and go on a walk looking for different colored leaves. Before the walk we would teach our students how to sign the words red, yellow, orange, and brown. This was a quiet walk, so as not to disturb nature. We would walk around the school and look for leaves changing color. When fall leaves were spotted, students would point and sign the color word. Finally, we would create beautiful (the children thought so) tissue paper leaves and use them to decorate our rooms. You can imagine all the things they would tell their parents over the weekend. Learning about why leaves change colors also falls under fun science activities for kindergarten. Planning for science experiments on Friday is another way to make sure students have a great day. For more details on this fun Fall lesson and for more Fall activities, read Fantastic Kindergarten Fall Activities.
Fun Activities for Kindergarten Math
Anything to do with food makes a great Fun Friday activity. Edible math is fantastic. This would include any math activity involving food: sorting and graphing candy; graphing the first bite of a gingerbread man; subtracting goldfish crackers (by eating them) are just a few ideas for edible math. You can teach a lot of kindergarten math concepts using food. The engagement is incredible.
Fun Snack Ideas for Kindergarten Class
As I said before, anything to do with food makes a great Fun Friday experience. We often had our students create special snacks to go along with our Fun Friday themes. When we did the Rainbow Fish, our students made adorable and yummy rainbow fish marshmallow pops. In winter we made marshmallow snowmen (we used a lot of marshmallows). During our nonfiction unit, while we were teaching how-to-texts, our students would read and follow recipes. Making mini tostadas was their favorite. Of course, when using food, you have to be mindful of food allergies. You may have to get creative with food substitutions, so that everyone can enjoy the activity. We found parents incredibly helpful with this and with supplying much of the food. Just be sure to give them plenty of notice.
Fun Friday and Field Trips
You can always schedule your field trips on Friday, this makes for a really fun but exhausting day. We found that scheduling our field trips earlier in the week made for less crowds, therefore we seldom scheduled our field trips on Friday. Instead, we did all our field trip related activities on Friday. For example, we might go to the zoo on a Tuesday. The following Friday, we would discuss our trip, write about it, and create a zoo related art project. We would also read and recreate a fun book like Dear Zoo. For more details on great kindergarten field trips, check out our blog Fantastic Field Trip Ideas & Virtual Field Trips.
Fun Writing Activities for Kindergarten
Another great thing about Fun Friday is the ease in which you can incorporate fun writing activities. Children love writing when they have something FUN to write about! We would save these writing pieces and create a class book, which we included in our class library. These books were very special to our students. They read them over and over again. At the end of the year, we used these books to create individual student memory books. These memory books showed the progression of each student’s writing.
Stay Tuned for Details on All of our Fun Friday Ideas!
There are so many fun activities for kindergarten. We are looking forward to sharing them with you! You can decide if you want to use them on Marvelous Monday, Terrific Tuesday, Wonderful Wednesday, or Fun Friday (it’s too hard to do alliteration with th).
So far, we have…
One Response
Fun Friday sound fantastic