I am a big fan of St. Patrick’s Day! I don’t think you need to be Irish to love this holiday. 😉 When I taught first grade, I loved having a little “treasure hunt” with my students. The kids would come in the classroom in the morning to a trail of green glitter. On the white board is the first clue. We spend the morning reading the clues and making inferences to figure out where the next clue is. It’s a lot of fun!
Each student has a student sheet to record their inference and the text clues that led them to that inference. (We fill that part out afterward.)
Here’s another inferencing activity that I still get to do with my reading groups. 🙂 I give each student a card to read. They use their strategies to decode the words. Then they read it a second time, looking for clues to lead them to their inference about where the gold is hidden.
Then each student read their card to the group. We filled out this chart together. Most of them could easily guess where the gold was hidden, but they had a hard time articulating how they knew. This was a great activity to practice looking for text clues. They really enjoyed it too!
You know I have to throw in some phonics too, right? We are working on reading two syllable words so I made this St. Patty’s-themed activity. First, I give them the two syllable cards that correctly make a word. They read each syllable and then put them together to blend the whole word. The next day, to make it more challenging, I mixed up the words. I matched up syllables incorrectly to make nonsense words. This forced them to depend on their phonics skills.
I added this to my St. Patrick’s Day pack.
This was a quick fun activity we did to practice silent e with long u, that I also added to the pack.
I’ve created another treasure hunt that I can do with my reading groups on St. Patrick’s Day (without having to go around the school). I found these pieces of fake gold, so I had to find a way to use them.
🙂 I “hid” them around the room. Before looking, we read the cards and made our inferences about where the gold was. Then we had fun looking in each spot for the gold.
To get the rest of these St. Patrick’s Day activities PLUS a lot more, click here. There are reading passages with comprehension activities, phonics activities, and writing activities.
