Star Wars Day 2020
It’s almost here….STAR WARS DAY! If you teach first, second or third graders then this is the perfect opportunity to incorporate Star Wars activities into your students’ learning and make it a day that they will never forget.
Star Wars Day in my classroom begins with Lightsaber Reading. The students enter a dimly lit classroom with the Star Wars theme playing in the background. Each student gets a sheet of the Star Wars Words Hidden Picture. They need to use their lightsabers (finger lights) to find the 10 Star Wars words that are hidden in the picture and record them on the recording sheet. They can color the sheet after they have found the words. This activity works great as an opening task.
Star Wars Day + Lego
One of my favorite parts of Star Wars day is the opportunity to incorporate SCIENCE!! My favorite activity is the Star Wars Ship Build. I put the students into groups of 3 or 4 and give them the parts from a Lego Star Wars Ship polybag. Depending on your group of kids you can decide to put the parts in a separate bin without the package or directions and have them work together to design a Star Wars ship using the pieces provided. It’s always fun to see the variety of ships built with the same set of Legos. You can check out my blog post from when I did the ‘blind build’ {here}.You can also give each group the bag and directions and have them work together to build the assigned ship. I have included a clip of my second grader doing a build solo so you can get a feel for how long it might take your group and what’s included. You can find that clip right here. Another idea to try if you don’t have polybags is to use random lego pieces and let the kids design their own ships. The possibilities are endless for this task.
Star Wars Day Directed Draw
Every Star Wars event must have a little yoda and I decided to let the kids draw him. Easy, it is not!!! It took me awhile to fine tune the steps and I think I have a pretty good way to teach Yoda via a directed draw. I know the kids do a much better job than me. I just give them the foundation and let them go. You can find my YouTube video {here}. Please remember I am not an art teacher!
Star Wars Day + Science
For those of us that can appreciate the original Star Wars know that you must incorporate the Han Solo carbonite scene if you want a true Star Wars day. This is not my original idea and there are lots of information on Pinterest for this one. But this is how I did it:
How would we get Han Solo out of the carbonite? The kids had lots of great ideas and we jotted them all down. Then… I gave everyone their own Han Solo in carbonite. They could not believe what was happening. I just love this age, everything is so amazing!! I think they actually cheered. Hilarious. They took this task super duper seriously. Han needed to be freed immediately and this was just the crew to do it. Each table got a cup of vinegar and they began dripping the vinegar onto the frozen Han. We used the neon straws as droppers and again the crowd went wild. I really had no idea that neon straws would evoke this kind of excitement. When Han started to bubble it was complete CRAZY town (in a good way). This was definitely a hit and an activity I will definitely do again. You can check out the whole post from the originator {here}.
Star Wars Day + Math
The day wouldn’t be complete without Star Wars Math. I used the Star Wars cereal (I got mine from Target) and the kiddos sorted the Star Wars shaped marshmallows onto the sorting mat. This activity is very similar to the Lucky Charm sorting activity most of us have done around St. Patrick’s Day. From the sorting mat the students transferred the data to make a bar graph. Once their bar graph is complete they analyzed their graph to answer questions about their data. You can watch a video of that activity {here}.
Finally, We ended our day with Yoda Soda. Yummy!!!
You can find all these activities and many more in my Star Wars Day activity pack on TpT right {here}. You can also watch a preview of the product on my YouTube channel {here}.
