Lent & Easter

We have been busy, busy, busy observing the season of Lent and preparing for Holy Week and Easter! Since we get out of school for vacation before Easter Sunday, I decided to focus on Holy Week early and begin our celebration of Jesus' resurrection this week. Here are a few activities that we did & I'll do my best to attach links so you can do them yourself if you would like!

Holy Week
We put together these mini books and read them together before discussing what happened on each day of Holy Week in more detail.

Stations of the cross
In the past I have taken my class to Stations of the Cross with the rest of the school and I have always felt like the kids were either bored or confused by all of the kneeling and standing and reciting and kneeling and standing and so on. This year, I decided to change things up and we have been doing our own stations of the cross in the classroom using the Multimedia Stations for Children from Loyola Press. I highly recommend this for little ones! The descriptions of the stations are short and my students really seemed to be interested and to understand what was going on (one of my little tough guys even cried the first time we did them together!)

Palm Sunday
I had the kids trace their handprint (palms...get it?) on green paper six times and cut them out. Then they glued three together to look like a palm branch and taped a popsicle stick onto the back.

After we read the story of Palm Sunday in our Children's Bible and learned the first part of the song Shout Hosanna we reenacted the scene. They waved their palm branches and sang while our volunteer Jesus walked through pretending to ride his donkey. It was very cute and they really had fun with it.

Holy Thursday
To explain Holy Thursday I read the story from our Children's bible of the washing of the feet, the last supper, and Jesus' arrest after praying in the garden. I was planning on having the kids do a Last Supper coloring page afterwards, but all of our printers AND copiers went down and my personal printer ran out of ink so I had to improvise. We did some directed drawing instead - I walked them through step by step but told them to get creative and that their's didn't have to look exactly like mine. Here's what mine ended up looking like:

And here are some of their masterpieces.

As you can see, some of them got very creative!


Good Friday
I found this art project on Do Small Things With Love and loved it but wasn't sure if we could handle watercolors. Instead, we ripped up some construction paper and glued to make a mosaic/stained glass window looking thing and it turned out to be pretty great!

Easter

This year I made my own Easter packs for Math and Literacy that you can grab for yourself from my TPT store if you are interested! Here are a few of the activities that are included:

Letter Hunt:
I hid the letter eggs around the room and showed them how to look for one at a time & to be sneaky about it and then let them go on a hunt. Each time they found one they gave them to me and then looked for more. Once I had all 26 we met on the carpet, put them in the pocket chart after taking turns making the sounds, and then put them in alphabetical order.

Story Elements: Before reading, I showed the kids the story elements graphic organizer that we would complete after the story and we reviewed the parts of a story with our favorite song by Dr. Jean:

Then we read Old Hippo's Easter Egg and stopped along the way to discuss the characters, setting, problem, and solution. After going over the worksheet one last time, I sent them to their tables and they got right to work. Of course my early finishers asked if they could color in the "peep, egg, chick, and other egg" and I said sure, why not...it is Easter after all :)

You can grab these and more Easter activities from my TPT store!

OR buy both together for a discounted price :)