Sperling Elementary School
Engage your family in a series of events in the Everywhere Book Fest!
The Everywhere Book Fest is a virtual celebration of authors, books, and readers that brings the book festival experience to everyone!
On May 1-2, the book festival will open its virtual doors and unveil two free full days of live and pre-recorded sessions with your favorite picture book, middle grade, and young adult authors.
Find your best (little) lab coat and use games and activities to explore the various branches of science that kids love, including life cycles, seasons, planets, animals, magnets, weather, states of matter (liquid, solid, gas), volcanoes, engineering, anatomy, shadows, senses, and paleontology, and skills including problem solving, observation, predicting, and classifying.
Oh, The Places You’ll Go (and the things you’ll see!)
Get online with your kids and find a park or trail near your home they’ve never been to before. Let them in on the decision-making and read about the types of trees, birds, or other particular features that can be found in that location. Bring along some water and snacks and set out to find all that you’ve read about. If you do find what you’re looking for, use your smartphone to take pictures home as a memory of the day. Take photos of other interesting birds, flowers, bugs, or trees.
Science examined: animals and habitations
Erupting with Fun Volcanoes
Volcanoes are truly a lava fun. (Sorry—couldn’t resist!)
Fill a plastic cup two-thirds of the way full with water and add five tablespoons of baking soda, one teaspoon of dish soap, and several drops of washable paint. Mix the materials together, put the cup on the ground, and form a mound of dirt or snow around the cup to just below its rim. Now comes the fun! Add one cup of vinegar and watch the lava erupt down the side of the mound. You can add vinegar a number of times until you need to add the base ingredients again.
Science skills used and branch of science examined: creating a chemical reaction and geology.
Balance Building
Pick uneven or unstable objects such as cards, paper cups, or rocks and challenge your kids to build as high as they can or in various shapes.
Science skills used: problem-solving
Static Fun
Learning about positive and negative charges is pure fun when playing with a balloon. Have your child rub an inflated balloon against their hair and see what they can stick it on or pick up. Can it stick to a wall or pick up pieces of confetti or flakes of pepper?
Science branch examined: electric charge
While it may seem that weeks away from school may be a recipe for falling behind on their education, there are so many opportunities for your kids to keep active and to keep learning. Stay safe, stay well, and stay active.
While reading is always encouraged, literacy skills such as letter recognition, writing, reading and following directions, vocabulary-building, retelling a story, letter-sound relationship, rhyming, and communication can all be practiced during active play.
Treasure Hunt
Hide an item somewhere inside or out and write clues for your little pirates to find the loot. Maybe they need to crawl across the couch, slide like a snail under a bed, reach behind a stool, or, if they’re outside, run to the pine tree, jump off a tree stump, dig into a hole, etc. Each clue can have words for older kids and pictures for younger ones.
Literacy skills used: reading and following directions
Freeze Dance Rhyme Dance
Crank the tunes and let the dancing begin. Unlike the regular game though, when the music stops, a designated person calls out a word. If the other dancer(s) can’t respond with a word to rhyme with it within a designated time period (say five to 10 seconds), that person is out.
Literacy skills used: rhyming
Lights, Camera, Action!
Kids will need some down time during their time away from school and odds are good that they’ll watch a movie or read a book or two. Have your kids reenact the stories while using your smartphone or tablet. Props and costumes will make this activity extra-fun!
Literacy skills used: retelling a story
Charades
Using a mix of easy and difficult words, have your kids act them out and see if their siblings or parents can guess what they are. If the kids don’t know the word they’re given, define it for them.
Literacy skills used: vocabulary-building
Instead of worksheets, build numeracy skills through play. Here are some fun ideas to work on addition, subtraction, fractions, mental math, shapes, time, money, geometry, multiplication, counting, patterning, and estimating.
Shape Hunt
Kids (and adults!) love a good scavenger hunt. Put a twist on the search by having kids find items of certain shapes. When all objects have been collected, kids can then trace and colour in the items on a separate sheet of paper. If the objects are items that can’t be picked up, such as a clock on a wall, let kids use your smartphone to take a photo of the item.
Print out or draw a sheet with shapes and let the hunt begin.
For the youngest in the household, have them find objects that are of simple shapes such as circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. Challenge older kids with searches for items in the shape of parallelograms, ovals, rhombuses, or scalene triangles.
This is a great game that can be played inside or out.
Math skills used: geometry
How High is That?
Rulers and measuring tapes are surprisingly popular items that kids love to use. Before starting the game, have kids use the measurement tools to see how high one meter or 50 centimetres is so that they have a general idea of what length they’ll be talking about.
For an outdoor version of this game, use (according to the temperature!) snowballs or wet sponges. Have one child at a time throw their item at a wall or fence and have them guess how high the mark it made on the wall is from the ground. Record their guess and have the next child guess. Have the child who threw the item use the measuring tape or ruler to determine the actual height of the throw. Who was closest?
Indoors, follow the same process as above but with a moistened, not soaked, sponge. One tip from a mom who’s been there: while they may try to convince you otherwise, snowballs should really stay outside!
Math skills used: measurement, estimation, and statistics
Roll to Win
Have your child toss two dice and add up the numbers that are rolled. Write down the total on a piece of paper. Reroll and keep adding up the numbers until you reach 100 (or a smaller number for younger kids).
Math skills used: addition
Time My Move
Choose a move and see how long your child can perform it while another uses a timer to measure. How long can they balance on one foot? How long will it take to run up a hill? How long can they keep up a balloon?
Check out the link below for live art classes Wednesdays and Fridays! They even have tutorials posted online for their previous sessions:
DIY Art
Another great idea for the whole family is doing a Paint Nite at home! Thick white paper or canvas paper can be used for many of the designs as long as there is time left in between layers for the paper to dry.
Paint Nite
Here is a list of 70 fun activities to do at home! You can cut them out and put them in a jar, and randomly pick one when you’re ready to do an activity!
Here’s a great at-home activity for you and your family. Join us on Saturday, April 18, for an online live stream presentation of “The Invisible Boy,” our critically-acclaimed, world premiere musical production from earlier this season. This charming, uplifting story shows that “an act of kindness opens a world of possibilities…” (The Charlotte Observer).
Watch Party Schedule
Click this link to get access to the live show: The Invisible Boy
Unfortunately, the GAUSS Math test has been cancelled for this year… However, they have released new activities and math questions to help students during this time of home learning!
Please check out the following link for grade level activities, questions, and resources! They are posting daily challenges for students who would like to continue to challenge their math skills.
The Center for Education in Mathematics and Computing: University of Waterloo
This website has a large selection of free audio books for students. Encourage your child to chose a book and listen to the story. They can write summaries of sections they listen to, describe characters, asking questions, or try to predict what will come next.
https://stories.audible.com/discovery
Free videos, games, quizzes and weird but true facts about animals, science, and history. Build your own telescope, check out photos of strange birds, and take a shark quiz or play a game that lets you become a master code breaker!
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/