Get Outside!

I love spring time!  I want to be outside more than the kids do.  I have a student that wants to be outside even if it's cold.  He craves being outdoors.  This week it was so beautiful that I decided we should do our tutoring session outside.

All you need to play this game outside is a list of words you want your students to work on, bean bags, Flip the Chip, and chalk. Below is an image of my Flip It game board.  Pair your students up to work.

Instead of using a game board, we drew it on the concrete with chalk and wrote "long a" words inside the circles.  Pairs of students could help draw the game board.  The game board shown here is circles drawn overlapping each other slightly.  I drew about 20.

Draw a starting line. Students are not allowed to step over that line, but can move side to side behind the line. Bean bags go on top of the students feet and then they flip them onto the game board. If the bean bag lands on a a circle, they read it and tell what letters in that word make it say the "long a" sound. If the bean bag lands on an intersection, they have to do all the words it's touching.

When all the words have been done, students can draw another game board and do it again with different words. This can be adapted for math or vocabulary review.

Another outside activity we did: Finding words within words. I wrote Easter Time on the concrete and my student had to find all the words he could think of and make a list. He wrote them on the concrete too. He loved being outside and moving around while he was learning.

What do you do outside with your students in the Spring?