Are you looking for spring activities for elementary students? April is just around the corner, so it’s time to plan those exciting springtime activities. I love teaching about spring because it allows my class to learn about the many things that are growing and blooming. Some of my favorite spring topics are the butterfly life cycle, plants and soil, and weather.
Below are ten fun spring activities for elementary students K-3. These resources are a mix of digital, low-prep, and print-and-go hands-on activities that will make your instruction meaningful! The targeted grade for these resources is kindergarten to third grade.
Plants and Soil Reading Passages and Worksheets
This is hands down one of my favorite resources, and it’s one I use in my classroom each year. I love using this resource because it features reading passages targeted at science content. All 12 of these passages have coordinating activities to accompany them, including comprehension questions, graphic organizers, and sorts.
The included graphic organizers are a great way to help students effectively retain the information they read about while also practicing their reading skills. With 12 activities total, this set can cover 12 weeks with one activity per week or 12 days with one activity per day. This is an excellent option for a fun Spring activity.
Oil Spill STEM Challenge
My Oil Spill STEM challenge is a resource I used with a summer STEAM camp that I hosted at my house. The students loved learning more about the unique topic of oil spills. I like using this as a Spring activity because it goes great with Earth Day. These activities can add some variety to your Earth Day unit.
This resource begins with an activity that allows students to experiment with different oils. In small groups, students observe oils and answer questions about them. Students also learn related vocabulary, read a passage, and answer comprehension questions about how scientists clean up oil spills.
The most engaging part of this resource is the Oil Spill Clean Up Challenge, where students are tasked with preparing and creating a device to clean oil from the ocean water’s surface after an oil rig leaks into the ocean. Students create their own boom and then test it to see if it can clean up the oil spill.
Another notable activity includes an art project where students learn about wax resistance. Students color an ocean scene with crayons and then paint over their picture with black watercolor paint.
Alphabet STEM Challenges
Ready to start reviewing letters with your kindergarteners? If you begin this STEM unit in April, you’ll have just enough time to get through each letter (one a week) before the end of the year!
This unit features 26 STEM challenges to represent each letter of the alphabet.
Looking for an alphabet activity for Earth Day? In this unit, Letter U stands for upcycling. Letter U’s STEM challenge has students recreate old products into something new. An example recreation in this product shows students turning cardboard tubes into pencil holders.
Butterfly Life Cycle
Teaching the butterfly life cycle was my favorite part about spring when I taught second grade; let me tell you why. I would order caterpillars each year, and my class would watch as the caterpillars transformed into butterflies. This was a fun unit to teach because of how interactive it was.
This resource contains a lapbook. Each day a new interactive piece is added to the lapbook for students to connect with. One of the pieces in the lapbook includes a graph where students graph how many days it takes and when the butterfly moves through each life stage. This allows students to track how long the butterfly is an egg, caterpillar, and chrysalis before becoming a butterfly.
Another piece of this lapbook revolves around the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. For this activity, we discussed how Eric Carle was incorrect with how he said caterpillars come out of the cocoon. In the lap book, students can write their own retelling of the story that is factually accurate.
We also use this resource to give students daily exposure to informative writing. Students take their Butterfly Life Cycle Observation Notes notebook to the round table and sit next to the caterpillars. They jot their thoughts about what’s happening during each life cycle stage. This is one of my favorite Spring activities for elementary!
Earth Day STEM Activities
If you were to ask your students, “What would you build if you had unlimited money and a waterfront property? What kind of home would you create?” wouldn’t you love to hear their answers? In this unit, one of the STEM challenges asks students to plan and draw whatever type of home they want on their waterfront property.
If you’re looking for other fun ways to teach Earth Day STEM, check out this blog post.
We then combine all of the students’ homes surrounding the river and add pollution dots to their properties. Through this lesson, students learn how pollutants spread in the soil and affect other places as they are carried by the water. This is just one of several activities in this bundle that allow students to think about the importance of caring for Earth.
Spring and Easter Math Games
Math and Grammar Games are one of my most versatile resources, and they are a staple of my classroom. The Spring and Easter Math Games resources work alongside my other math and grammar games resources. The cards have basic math facts that can be mixed with any of the other math games. You also can use these themed game boards with whichever targeted math cards you already have that align with your current instruction. This resource also has related STEM challenges.
The Spring Math Games resource features a challenge called Butterfly Catcher. As students answer questions correctly, they earn nets to catch butterflies. Students can only win once they have collected 20 nets.
The Easter Math Games resource features a STEM challenge that asks students to build an egg using only the resources they gathered from playing STEM to WIN in their small group.
Both resources contain other themed STEM challenges and activities for students. Use these resources individually or in conjunction with your other Math and Grammar Games purchases.
Spring Digital Math Games
On the contrary, if you want some digital math games, these are a resource that I love and am proud of! The entire resource is interactive, which helps students stay engaged and learn. As students progress through the games, flowers grow and clouds empty. This can be played on a SmartBoard, iPad, Chromebook, or another device. All that students need access to PowerPoint or Google Slides on their devices.
Spring STEM Activities
Looking for a way to get your students engaged in math? This resource features both insect model pollinators and catapulting butterflies. It’s as fun as it sounds, I promise.
This unit integrates learning about animals and pollinators with three-digit addition and subtraction, telling time, and money. For the first STEM challenge, students create insect models with pipe cleaner feet and then are tasked with transferring cinnamon and sugar from one plate to another using only their models.
The second STEM challenge asks students to create catapults. Students launch butterflies with math facts and try to make them land on a target. The butterflies tell students how much to add or subtract to their starting number.
Weather Science Unit
I wanted to include my weather unit as a spring activity because teachers often introduce their weather unit during this time of year. This unit contains all of my favorite resources for weather in one place! There are reading passages, lapbooks, worksheets, and crafts in this unit, so many weather-related activities!
The Water Cycle worksheet and craft is my favorite activity in this unit. In this activity, students become water droplets. We place different colored spinners labeled around the room with the name of places a water droplet can go, such as the ocean, clouds, animals, etc.
They choose whichever spinner around the room they want to start with. Then, students spin the spinner using a paper clip and pencil. Depending on what location students spin, they color their bracelet with that corresponding color.
Students can create their own stories about how their water droplet ended up where it did. For example, if students spin their first spinner and land on vegetation, they walk to the vegetation spinner, see that it is green, and color the circle on their bracelet green. They repeat this until their bracelets are complete.
These bracelet stories beg questions like, if a student began on an animal, did a shark gobble them up, causing them to end up in the ocean?
This is just one of several interactive activities within the weather unit.
Rain in a Cup Science Experiment
This resource could be used anytime, but I especially like to use it as a Spring activity. This activity is fun to teach your students about the water cycle. Make it rain in a cup with this hands-on science experiment. Kids take shaving cream and water, drip the food coloring, and see how many drops it takes to rain. This teaches students that clouds hold water. This freebie includes a science experiment, group cards, and writing pages, so you can easily do this experiment. Watch this quick tutorial on my Instagram page.
Try this activity for free!
I hope you can pick the perfect Spring activities for elementary students after reading this. There is something about spring in the classroom that makes everything feel fresh and exciting. I hope these resources can help do just that. Happy spring and happy learning!
Leave a Reply