Anna Stover

Early Elementary Activities

Below you will find an assortment of a few of the activities completed when I taught kindergarten. We like to stay active, with many hands-on activities! Some of our favorite activities include literacy centers, word hunts, and shared reading.

We started off the school year reading the famous Chicka, Chicka, Boom, Boom. The students loved decorating the class coconut tree with all the falling letters, and had a blast creating their own tree with the letters of their names falling from the branches!

One of our favorite activities is Shaving Cream Writing! Students get to interact with their words and numbers while practicing writing and number skills! And, it makes the classroom smell fresh and clean!

Here, the students are churning butter! Miss Martha, a pilgrim, came to visit from the past and explain what life was like at the time of the First Thanksgiving.

After a unit studying living things, Kindergarten worked cooperatively to create a beautiful class garden!

Here, we learned about labeling and the human body by making life-sized pictures of ourselves! They turned out great!

Blast into Space!

One of our favorite times of the year is our Space unit! We transform our room into outer space, learn about the planets, moon phases, satellites, and stars and do projects galore! We even create our own imaginary planet and write a book about it! It is amazing how much the students absorb!

Middle School Activities
Here is a selection of activities from 6th grade Humanities lessons. With humanities being an integrated subject, it allowed me much flexibility with providing a variety of experiences.

After learning about the difference between "denotation" and "connotation," the students worked collaboratively to sort and define various groups of words with similar meanings. Some groups even decided to order their words from most to least positive or negative!

Learning about ancient civilizations is always fascinating! Here, the students were practicing what it was like for the world's earliest writers who wrote cuneiform. Here, students had to develop their own alphabet and carve a saying into clay.

To learn about the mummification process, the students conducted their very own mummification experiment--on a hot dog! The results are always fascination, albeit a bit smelly!

Above are some literary plot mountains which helped students reinforce the major elements of fictional texts.

I have found simulations to be a great way to engage students and bring history to life. On the left, you see marshmallow catapults that tribes raced to create. They needed to identify their resources, develop a communication system, barter with other tribes and assemble their new invention, all without verbally communication with any other tribe! The finish mystery invention was then put to the test! To the right, you see a Greek warrior during our Greek fashion show, which is part of the Greek Olympics, our culminating activity to our major Greek city-state simulation!