7 Bohemian Inspired History Crafts

Wearable art with educational lessons tied in! Visit We Are Teachers for the rest of the post!

Plant Scavenger Hunt

Take students outside for a plant scavenger hunt! Click here to download. Students tally how many vascular and nonvascular plants they find. Then they draw an example of each. Throughout their walk, they take photos of different plants that they believe represent 7 different types of seed dispersal. They check off different types of roots they come across based on their knowledge of plants. They draw an example of a stem they investigated. Then they draw 2 different leaves and describe the leaves' properties (color, size, texture).

Sap to Syrup: States of Matter and Heat

Explore what form of energy transforms maple sap into maple syrup, then maple candy!
Video Introduction: Sap in the Sugar Maple Tree
Book: Sugaring Time by Kathryn Lasky
Resources to explain the process: Word Playhouse
Maple Sugar Tree Identification sheet: Ohio Thoughts Blog

Recording sheets about Heat and the States of Matter: click here 
- Students label the states of matter for each stage of the maple syrup process. Then, they identify heat as being the form of energy that changes maple sap into syrup, then maple candy.
- Maple Taffy Experiment with snow, students record the results of the experiment.
- Checklist if students go on a maple sugaring field trip

Recipe for maple candy: All Recipes
Recipe for Maple Taffy for the Freezing Experiment - The Kitchn

Season: End of February / Beginning of March

Alphabet Grid: Phonics

materials: sidewalk chalk or masking tape

ABC GRID

Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondance & Letter Recognition

1. Jump on letter name, say the sound

2. Teacher calls out a letter sound, student jumps on the letter that represents the sound

3. Hold up an object, have the student locate and jump on the beginning, middle or end sound. Ex: Beginning sound of the word ball. Student jumps on the letter /b/

Segment & Blend the Word

After children find beginning, middle and end sounds of the word, have them segment it 

and blend the word on a separate. Ex: grid /b/ /a/ /ll/ = ball

(Phoneme segmentation. The ability to identify separate phonemes in a spoken word.)

SPELL

Have child choose an object and spell the word phonetically, jumping to each letter on the alphabet grid. Child shouts out letters Ex: dog: child jumps on D-O-G 

Watercycle Red Light Green Light

Switch up Red Light Green Light by incorporating the water cycle!
Precipitation = Green (Kids run and wiggle their fingers like rain)
Evaporation = Yellow (Kids walk slowwwly and lift their arms up to the sky)
Condensation = Red (Kids stop and create a cluster. They place their arms around each others' shoulders - hug!)

Food Chain Freeze Tag

This activity is inspired by Eecko World's "We're All In This Together." Rather than having kids play tag using organisms from a single food chain, make it more challenging by adding a variety of food chains!

Give each child a construction paper headband with a different plant or animal that is part of a food chain (include organisms from different habitats). Take students to a large open area outside. Kids have to look for a plant or animal that their organism consumes. They tag what they eat! If a child is tagged, they must freeze (stand still)! Who is left at the end of the game?!

Afterwards, have kids try to find organisms that belong to their habitat (creating small groups). Kids must problem solve and try to figure out who belongs in their "group." Also, where would you find the organisms in their group? What habitat do they live in?!

Place Value Hopscotch

Create a place value hopscotch with sidewalk chalk! (You can include higher values or decimals as well). One player hops and the other watches and figures out the number. 

Ex: 823,005
The player hops 5 times on the 1
0 times on the 10 and 100
3 times on the 1,000
2 times on the 10, 000
8 times on the 100,000
The other player must watch closely, so he can figure out the number. Then, he writes the numeral on the pavement.

After kids take turns hopping a couple times, have them compare the numerals they made. Which number is the largest? Who created the smallest number? Can they point out the odd and even numbers they created?

Water Wheels

Integrate math (measuring), science / engineering (simple machines, force/motion, renewable energy), art (design), and history by constructing a water wheel! 

Wired - Can you construct a water wheel that can lift a small load?
Science Buddies - "Put Your Water to Work," exploring Hydropower!
Meet the Greens - Kids go green (water wheel featured bottom right)
History - water wheel / Types - get kids inspired (design) / Physics - water wheel

Playground Prepositions

Take your students out on the playground to explore prepositions!

Outdoor Math + Checkers

Practice your math skills by playing checkers! Check out Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational for a milk cap version (addition and subtraction).

Then, visit Crayola to see how to make an oversized checker board on the pavement! (featured above)

Add math equations to the blank boxes and you're ready to play! Kids move their checkers across the equations and try to solve them!

P.O.S. Musical Plates

materials: paper plates (3 for each child)
Write a noun, verb, or adjective on each paper plate. Lay the plates out in an open space outside. Play music and kids dance from plate to plate. When the music stops, the child picks up the plate and keeps it. The goal is to collect one noun, verb, and adjective plate. If the child lands on a noun when the music stops, and he already has a noun, he doesn't keep the plate. Once everyone has each part of speech, they use their creativity and imagination to create a unique sentence using the words they collected on their plates!

Biodiversity Scavenger Hunt

Kids hunt for abiotic and biotic factors in their backyard (or school yard). Then, based on their observations, they create a food chain or web to represent what they discovered in the ecosystem they explored! Click here for the printable

Time Warp!

Lay out the time warp mats, give kids a sentence, and have them run to the correct verb tense mat! Once on the mat, they identify the verb within the sentence.

Example:
He ate an orange! (Child runs to the "past" mat and calls out "ate") 
He eats an orange everyday!
He will eat an orange!

Capacity Relay Race

Split kids up into 2 teams. Give each team a bucket of water and a sponge. Across from each team set up different sized containers (cup, liter, gallon -also can include- pint, quart, half gallon) in a line. Kids within a team take turns racing to fill a gallon of water! 

First, they must fill up their cup by dipping the sponge into the bucket of water and squeezing the water out into the cup. Once the cup is filled, they dump it into the next item. The item won't be filled after a single cup. So, the next team member races to fill up another cup. Once the bottle is filled, they write down how many cups it took to fill the bottle. 

Then, they dump it into the next sized container. The water won't fill up the container. They have to start racing to fill up a cup again and figure out how many cups will fill up this container. 

The winner is the first team to fill up the last, largest container and have the correct answers written down (how many cups are in each container)!

Spiky Crystals

Grow crystals in your fridge with epsom salt and hot water!
Chemistry crystals (featured above) - Instructables
Cup of Quick Crystal Needles - About.com

You can also explore evaporation by growing crystals outdoors! Check out Exploratorium's Spiky Sun Crystals!

To incorporate this into a fossil unit, grow crystals on a sponge to investigate permineralization, visit Layers of Learning!

Cubes and Color

How does color affect how fast an ice cube will melt?! Investigate the heat absorbing capacity of different colors by placing ice cubes on various colors of construction paper (make sure you include black and white). Do certain colors reflect or absorb more light? Lay the paper and cubes in a super sunny spot. Then, make a prediction, create a list of what cubes you think will melt the fastest. Have kids write the color names in a column, starting with the color they think will make the ice cube melt the fastest and ending with the color they think will melt the ice cube the slowest. Create a graph of the kids' predictions. 

Green Planet suggests a twist on the experiment. Kids test colored cubes on white paper. They use food coloring to create different colors. For a white cube they add milk. To create a black cube they add cola. They place one colored cube on each piece of white paper. Which cube will melt the fastest?!

Solar Energy Balloon Blow Up!

Explore the power of the sun's heat by blowing up a balloon on a bottle! Kids paint one soda bottle white and the other black. Once dry, they attach a small balloon to the necks of their bottles. Then, they put the bottles out in the sun for a solar reaction!

Kids see that the air in the black bottle will make the balloon expand! The white bottle doesn't heat up as fast. Check out the experiment here!

Kid Meteorologist

Become a weather watcher by making your own weather instruments!

Rain Gauge - Measure rainfall - Jameson's Lab

Visit Scholastic for a printable to go along with your rain gauge!

Wind Vane - Measure wind direction - Weather Studies

Anemometer (paper cup) - Measure wind speed - Instructables

Anemometer (different design) - Science Fair Projects

Barometer - Measure atmospheric pressure - HowCast

Balloon Barometer - Sci-Experiments and Zoom (simple version)

Thermometer - Check the temp! - JumpStart

A variety of weather experiment videos - DIY: Meteorologist

Solar Water

Investigate renewable energy, while exploring the water cycle, with this fun experiment from Agoosa! Kids magically turn salt water into fresh water with the help of solar energy!

how to:
Pour 2 cups of water into a large bowl.
Mix 3 tsp of salt into the water. Taste the water, it's super salty!
Place a small empty bowl or cup inside of the larger bowl. 
Cover with plastic wrap and place outside in the sun.
Either place a rock on top of the bowl or secure the wrap with a rubber band (to keep plastic wrap tightly secured on the bowl).
Keep the bowl outside for 1 to 3 days (until you get enough purified water into your small bowl to taste).
Compare the water in the larger bowl to the water in the smaller bowl. Do you taste the difference?!

what's happening?!
The sun's rays will heat the water, causing it to evaporate!
Salt is too heavy to evaporate; so, it stays in the larger bowl.
Condensation will occur, creating water droplets on the plastic wrap.
Gravity makes the large droplets drip into the "collection container" (your small bowl) - creating fresh water!

Egg DROP!

Humpty Dumpty Project: Can you keep an egg from cracking? Kids use any materials they want to protect their egg from a giant free fall! They drop their protected eggs from a super high spot. Then, they examine their egg and see if it's still intact!

Featured above:
straws with paper propellers - Sun Pack
coffee filter, paper bowl, pie pan parachute - News Miner
balloon parachute - Virginia Tech Outreach Program
tp tubes/ bubble wrap and balloon exterior - My Science 8