Check out these 20 April-themed activities and ideas for upper elementary that will keep your students guessing what might come next!
April showers bring… a whole bunch of fun holidays to celebrate with your upper elementary students.
Whether you are playing April Fools’ pranks on your students or setting goals for Read Across America Day, your students will love these April-themed activities and ideas for upper elementary.
Today, we are sharing ideas you can use with students throughout April to celebrate the month, prepare for spring, and get your students excited to learn.
April-Themed Activities and Ideas for Upper Elementary: Holidays
Let’s begin by focusing on the different holidays that take place (or sometimes take place) during April.
April 1st: April Fools’ Day
Activity #1 | Play April Fools Math
Pass out to students a sheet of math questions that you’ve “answered.” Then tell students that you have “fooled” them. Some of the answers you provided are not correct, and they have to go find them.
Activity #2 | April Fools Writing Prompt
Get your copy of the April Holiday Writing Prompts, and work through the very first one of the set, which focuses on April Fools’ Day! This April Writing Prompt Bundle also includes prompts for the other holidays mentioned in this post!! (Note: If you plan to use the holiday writing prompts daily throughout the year, you may benefit from grabbing the full bundle! Click here to see what is in the bundle!)
Activity #3 | April Fools History Lesson
Pick a topic you’ve been learning about, and play a little review game.
- Give students five slips of paper, each with a fact about the topic. However, one detail on every slip is not true. In fact, if you change one word, the fact will be accurate.
- Write the list of words on the board where students can see them, and then challenge them to go through their slips of paper and figure out how to use the words on the board to correct each fact.
- Check out the example below. (The underlined words are the ones that would be changed out. You would not underline the words in your example.)
- The words in the parenthesis would be the ‘correct’ answers. I would write them on the board like this: eventually, 6, above, full, 3.
Example: Incorrect Titanic “Facts”:
- #1 | The first lifeboat was released a half (full) hour after the ship struck the iceberg, and it only carried 28 people. It could have carried 64 people.
- #2 | The remains of the Titanic took over 7 decades to find, and it is covered in bacteria. The majority of the remains are still at the bottom of the ocean and will never (eventually) be entirely eaten away by bacteria.
- #3 | Only ½ (3-changing the 3 would make it ⅓) of the people on the ship made it to safety and survived the crash.
- #4 | Although the Titanic could have carried 24 (6-changing the 6 would make it 64) lifeboats, it only carried 20 lifeboats on its maiden voyage. Despite the packed ship, many lifeboats that carried surviving passengers were not completely full.
- #5 | The iceberg that the Titanic hit probably jutted below (above) the water 100ft.
All the facts for this example were pulled from this USA Today webpage, so you could have students read through that page to try to answer the questions.
Titanic Remembrance Day (April 15th)
Activity #1 | People of the Titanic Matching Game
Play a little matching game with students as they learn about the people on board the Titanic. Print out pictures of some of the people who were on the Titanic, along with short bios about them. Give students a chance to try to match the bio to the pictures.
Activity #2 | Blend it with April Fools
Use the third April Fools activity above as a way of remembering and learning about the Titanic. We’ve already written the ‘facts,’ provided a list of words, and given you a resource for students to use. Now it is just up to you to implement it!
Earth Day (April 22nd)
Activity #1 | Close Reads with Mystery Pictures
Use these Close Read passages to learn more about Earth Day while also practicing some reading skills and getting in a little more review before the testing season begins!
Activity #2 |Earth Day Sticker Style Review
Get a digital activity into the mix with this Earth Day Sticker Style activity to help students practice their ELA skills. With 30 different questions spread over three different self-check Google Form™ activities, students will be inspired by all the different examples of people finding ways to help protect the Earth.
Activity #3 | Earth Day Game Show!!
This is a fan favorite. This Jeopardy-style game show will give your students plenty of opportunities to learn about Earth Day and the different things they can do to protect the Earth. Although all the passages are about Earth Day, the questions are all about ELA skills, so whether they know a lot about Earth Day or not, they can still participate and review their ELA skills!
Drop Everything and Read Day (April 12th)
Activity #1 | Figurative Language Scavenger Hunt
One of the goals of Drop Everything and Read Day is to get students to just read. You can also give them the goal of finding examples of different kinds of figurative language while they read. In this post, we talk about using picture books to practice figurative language. I suggest handing out a list of figurative language examples you want students to find and asking students to write down specific examples.
Sticky note Option: You can also have students write examples on sticky notes to put on the board as they find them. At the end of the day, count how many examples your student found, and use some of the greatest examples to create a figurative language review worksheet later in the year.
Activity #2 | Your Favorite Book
Read your students some of your favorite childhood books today. If you’re willing, tell them about what the books remind you about from when you were growing up. Lay out some of your favorite books, and let students choose from them during one of your reading sessions today.
Easter (sometimes in April)
Since Easter sometimes makes an appearance in April, we will also add a few Easter-themed resources and activity ideas to this list.
Activity #1 | Non-Religious Easter Close Reads
This Easter Close Reads set is non-religious and a great way to consider the holiday. With a combination of both fictional and non-fiction passages, students will get the reading practice they need while celebrating the holiday.
Activity #2 | Easter Egg Hunts
I love using Easter eggs as a way to make an everyday task more exciting. Check out this blog post where I talk about using Easter Eggs to enhance how you use the Holiday Writing Prompts and this post where I talk about repurposing game show slides. In both situations, we are getting students up and moving around (egg hunt style) while still completing some of our typical classroom activities.
Spring-Themed Activities
Although April is not the official start of spring, it is appropriate to include some spring when you are thinking about adding in some April-themed activities and ideas for upper elementary, as both April and May are the only months that are entirely situated in the spring season in the US.
Here are a few of our top Spring-Themed resources!
April Close Reads
In our April Close Reads set, we have passages about poetry, rainbows, and Jackie Robinson.
Since April is National Poetry Month, it is a great time to get some extra poetry practice in, and the poem that is a part of this close reading set is a great place to start.
National Rainbow Day also falls in April so the rainbow close read may be a good choice around the 3rd of April.
Baseball starts this month, so the close read about Jackie Robinson could be a ‘home run’!
A Digital Activity
Last but certainly not least, we also have these Spring Sticker Style activities. Although many of our April-themed activities and ideas for upper elementary are physical activities that require some prep to pull off, this sticker-style activity is completely done online and is self-checking. It is a great activity for students to do while you work with small groups, or they may be completing the activity while you work on setting up one of the egg hunts we mentioned earlier!
April is a fun month that is highly anticipated by both teachers and students alike because of its proximity to the end of the school year in the US. Unfortunately, April can also feel like a long month as it is not known for having many school breaks, and in some parts of the US, it is the last full month of school.
By adding in some of these April-themed activities and ideas for upper elementary, the month will get a little more exciting for your students while the class still focuses firmly on reviewing and building on skills!
For even more monthly ideas, check out the full-year list of monthly blog posts below!
- January Holiday Activities and Ideas
- February Holiday Activities and Ideas
- March Holiday Activities and Ideas (Coming Soon)
- April Holiday Activities and Idea
- May Holiday Activities and Ideas
- June Holiday Activities and Ideas
- July Holiday Activities and Ideas
- August Holiday Activities and Ideas
- September Holiday Activities and Ideas
- October Holiday Activities and Ideas
- November Holiday Activities and Ideas
- December Holiday Activities and Ideas
