End of the Year Freebies

I know many of you are already out for summer, but for those of you still teaching, here are a few fun freebies to use with your students.

Here are 20 fun Would You Rather Questions that all have to do with the end of the school year or summer. Use as discussion starters or writing prompts!

This ABC nature walk would work well on a field trip to a natural area, or as a summertime activity for scout groups, summer camp, or even just for fun with your own children. 

Now that testing is over, try these fun Creative and Critical Thinking Activities. They will make sure that your student's brains don't go to sleep at the end of the year.

And finally, for the younger set, here is a graphic recipe for making a single serving of baggie ice cream. This could be used in a mini-unit about ice cream (write poems, make up flavors, do math story problems etc.) or would be fun for scout and camp groups. 

Wishing you a wonderful last few days (or weeks) and a delightful summer break!

Christmas and Hanukkah Activities

Just in case you missed them, here are some fun and free Christmas (and Hanukkah) activities to use with your students. 

Christmas Would You Rather Questions for Kids

Christmas Analogy Fun

Christmas Break Scavenger Hunt

Twelve Days of Christmas Math Word Problems

Christmas Tic-Tac-Toe Journal Prompt Grid

Elf Hunt

Hanukkah Vocabulary Matching and Word Search

Menorah Logic Puzzle

How Many Latkes? Logic Puzzle

And of course the giant TpT Winter Holiday Tips and Freebies Ebook!, which you really, don't want to miss!

FREE Elf Hunt Christmas Week Activity!

Here is a fun game to play with your students during that last week before the holiday break. Just print and cut out the twelve numbered elves and hide them around your classroom. Tell your students that twelves elves are hiding in the classroom and it is their job to find them. During the week, students can search for the elves whenever they have a few spare moments and record the hiding places on the recording sheet. For younger students there is a separate recording sheet that does not require writing. Be sure students know that they must keep the hiding places secret! Another option is to play this game in one session, perhaps at your holiday party.

Download Elf Hunt for Free Here

I have about a dozen holiday freebies and I will try to get them all posted in the next few days, but you can find them right now in the Holiday section of my TpT store.

More Thanksgiving Freebies!

A little creative and critical thinking mixed in with all that turkey is a good thing! Here are some freebies for you to use with your students! Just click on the image to download.

Thanksgiving Challenge! Fun and FREE

I was surprised and delighted to see how popular the 11-11-11 Challenge was last week, so I decided to create a similar activity for Thanksgiving. Your students will love this fun combination of creative thinking, trivia/research and math. You can use it in class as bell work or enrichment, or send it home for the long weekend. Perfect for grades 3-6.

Download yours for free right here!

Find more FREE Thanksgiving activities 
in my TpT store!

FREE: Five Suffix, Prefix and Word Root Worksheets

Here are five free worksheets (with answer keys) to use with your class to help reinforce affixes and to introduce word roots. These five worksheets will work fine as stand-alone activities, but are actually part of a much larger, 40 page prefixes, suffixes, and roots product.

Download this worksheet plus four more right here

11-11-11 Challenge - Free Scavenger Hunt Activity!

This year, November 11 is rather a special date...three elevens! 11-11-11 is considered by many to be a particularly lucky number, so this date is considered to be lucky as well - some would say extremely lucky.

11-11-11 also happens to be my birthday, so I made a fun little birthday present for you and your students. This activity is perfect for grades 3-8 and will make a great homework assignment (because you probably have 11-11-11 off since it is also Veterans Day)

Download the 11-11-11 Challenge Here

I would of course, love to get a few more followers and newsletter subscribers for my birthday, so please do check out the right sidebar for ample opportunities and feel free to pass this along to your friends and colleagues.

FREE for Halloween: Fun Scattagories Type Activity!

As if you don't have enough Halloween freebies already, here is another one! I was actually inspired to make this by a game my friends and I used to play in college called STAMP. This was long before the board game Scattegories came out. We just drew grids on notebook paper and made up our own categories. I adapted that game to create GHOST.

You could use this activity for a fun homework assignment, at a Halloween center or even at your class Halloween party. Be sure to give your students time to share their answers!

Get Yours for Free Right Here!

Free Jenga Multiplication and Addition Games

Why use flashcards or worksheets to practice basic facts when you can use a game instead? You can use these free fact strips to make Jenga into a game students will love to play again and again. If you don't have a class Jenga set already, you can probably find one for a dollar or two at a thrift store.

The game requires a little prep since you must cut the strips and tape them to the Jenga blocks (but this would also be a swell job for a parent volunteer). But once the game is ready, it can be played all year long. Perfect for any math center!

Free Addition Jenga 

Free Multiplication Jenga 

You can also get a fun Get-to-Know you Jenga game for free right here!

Find more great Math Center ideas at Laura Candler's Corkboard Connections!

Fact Swap Freebie!

Here is a fun game you can play with your class to review a unit you are studying, or maybe to debrief after a guest speaker, field trip, or a lesson in which a lot of information has been presented. You could actually play this game on notebook paper or by having students draw a nine-square grid on their papers, or you could download this free game sheet here.

To play, have each student write down three facts about the subject at hand. The more original the fact the better- you don't want everyone to have the same facts for this game.

Once everyone has three, allow students to mill around the room trading facts with their classmates in order to get six more facts. In order to get a new fact, a student must trade one from the top of his or her sheet. Students can only trade one fact with each person, so each fact must come from a different classmate.You might want to have students write the name of the student the fact came from under the fact.

When you are done, each student should have nine different facts.

Here are some ways to extend the activity:

• Allow everyone to share one fact
• Graph the facts to see how many are duplicates, which is the most popular, how many are completely original etc.
• Have each student write one neatly on a fact circle (basically a round piece of construction paper) and post them on a bulletin board.
• Turn the facts into questions and give a quick quiz to the class. 

Download Fact Swap for Free

Free Incredible Ideas Ebook!

Looking for some terrific ideas to use in your classroom? This ebook is a compilation of the forty best ideas that came from the Incredible Ideas contest that I was lucky enough to participate in, along with Shelley Gray (who hosted and put this great book together), Laura Candler, and Denise Boehm. 


Inside this 21 page ebook you will find:

• Ideas for building community in your classroom
• Ideas for encouraging creativity
• Icebreaker tips and ideas
• Ideas for facilitating cooperative learning.

And you can download it free right here!

Congratulations to Eileen Snover who won the contest and received a $100 dollar shopping spree in our TpT stores.

Hundreds of Freebies at the Lesson Cloud Today!

The Lesson Cloud is the blog to stalk today! New freebies just keep popping up every few minutes. Every grade level, every subject, from a huge group of amazing Teachers Pay Teachers sellers. You are sure to find tons of great resources. No worries if you can't get there today, the freebies are all being archived on a link on the sidebar.