Igniting Critical and Creative Thinking

The Ultimate List of Engaging Spring Activities for Teachers

Looking to bring a little spring into your classroom? This list of my favorite spring activities will have your students engaging in meaningful reading, writing, and math activities all focused on the season!

When it starts to warm up and those daffodils start poking through the dirt, you know it is time to pull out those spring activities! You love a good theme, but with so much else on your plate, I’m sure it seems like a monumental task to brush off and prep all of those old activities. This list of spring activities will breathe fresh life into your classroom with minimal prep!

Spring Would You Rather

I don’t know about you, but my students loved “Would You Rather” activities! So, I always made sure to have one ready to go in our writing center.

With questions like: “Would you rather waddle like a duck or hop like a frog?” my students loved practicing their opinion writing skills.

For the best results, I would always put together 4-6 question choices on a ring so that students could easily flip through and make a choice. Then in folders, I would put graphics organizers so that they were easily accessible to help them plan their writing.

Try these Spring Would You Rather questions in your classroom for free! With 18 prompts and graphic organizers, your writing center will be all set for spring!

You Can Write a Spring Story

Once your students have their fill of opinion writing, another great activity for your writing center is You Can Write a Spring Story.

For this spring activity, I would leave out spring-themed cards for students to choose from that would help them build their stories.

Students would pick a setting, problem, and character cards. You can also have them randomly draw these cards for an extra challenge.

Using these cards, they would have the key pieces of information needed to work on their story. This activity uses a variety of graphic organizers to guide students through steps to develop their characters and help them plan their writing before getting started.

Spring Logic Puzzles

Want some unique spring activities that students probably haven’t done before? These Spring Logic Puzzles are perfect for bringing some novelty into your classroom this spring!

Logic puzzles are a great way to develop skills in logical thinking, problem-solving, making inferences, drawing conclusions, recognizing similarities and differences, as well as comparing and contrasting.

With Sudoku picture puzzles, matrix logic puzzles, and Magic Square puzzles, these activities will have your students excited to play while their brains are doing hard work!

I loved using these logic puzzles as morning warm-ups to get students ready to learn for the day and for early finishers who could use an extra challenge.

Birds On a Wire Sequencing Puzzles

Just like the Spring Logic Puzzles, Birds on a Wire is a fun way to help students improve their critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

Students must use logic and reasoning to create a set of birds on a wire that satisfies all the clues in the puzzle.

The activities require them to analyze statements about relationships, evaluate a solution to see if it meets given criteria, explain their reasoning, create more than one solution to a problem, and generate their own problems and solutions.

Spring Math Logic Puzzles

If you haven’t noticed yet, I loved using logic puzzles in my classroom! There is nothing more important than helping our students learn critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

This is why I always made sure to have a lot of spring activities where students could work on these skills.

These Spring Math Logic Puzzles focus on algebraic reasoning. I would set up the task cards that contained both addition and subtraction puzzles in our math center for students to work through.

These spring activities were perfect for developing a math mindset, promoting critical thinking, and providing enrichment opportunities for high achievers and early finishers.

Picture Books About Spring

Chicken Sunday

Chicken Sunday by Patricia Polacco is a perfect read-aloud for springtime, especially around Easter. This story features a young Russian girl and focuses on interracial friendships. It is a beautiful story about the power of family.

The children in the book set out to get their gramma Eula an Easter hat she wanted. Unfortunately, they don’t go about getting a hat in the right way, but in the end, they learn exactly how to get gramma Eula what she wants.

Read alouds like this one are a fantastic way to teach and practice story elements. That is why I created a literature guide to help students think deeply about the text and practice responding to literature. I’ve found that pairing the read-aloud with this literature guide helped my students get the most out of Chicken Sunday!

Miss Rumphius

Miss Rumphius, written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney, is one of my favorite picture books to read during the spring and to celebrate Earth Day.

In this story, Miss Rumphuis sets out to help make the world more beautiful by planting lupines. Miss Rumphuis lives an eventful life traveling the world, but she doesn’t figure out how to make the world more beautiful until she is an old woman looking out her window at the lupines in her yard. She decides to spread lupine seeds all over her town to spread beauty. Then every spring her community is filled with colorful lupines for all to enjoy.

A lovely story about leaving the world a better place than before, your students will fall in love with Miss Rumphius. I loved pairing the reading of this story with activities from this literature guide during the week before Earth Day. I’m certain your students will love these spring activities as well!

You can learn more about how I used to celebrate Earth Day in my classroom in this post!

No Stress Spring Activities For Your Classroom

There are many ways to bring the excitement of spring into the classroom. You can find all of these activities and more in my Teachers Pay Teachers store!

Save These Spring Activities for Later

Pin this to your favorite classroom Pinterest board, so you can easily get back to these engaging spring activities!

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hey y'all

I'm Susan!

I’m Susan Morrow and I help overwhelmed teachers create thinking classrooms where students discover the joy in learning and achieving.

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