Give Them a Chore You've Been Meaning to Tackle

The Junk Drawer

For kids, cleaning out junk drawers is a bit like discovering treasure. Have them start by separating and putting like objects together in piles. For the pens and markers, give them a piece of scratch paper to write on. If the writing utensil doesn't work, chunk it.

Finally, grab some dividers and small baskets from the dollar store, and let the kids rearrange the items back inside. Not only will that be one less item on your To Do list, but it will have kept them occupied for a while. Please be warned you will be interrupted several times with amazed "Ooh! Look at this!" and "Look what I found!" comments, as well as curious "Mom, what's this for?" and "Can I have this?" remarks.

(Additional hint: this type of activity works best on a bad weather day, when they can't go outside to play.)

I Spy - Math and Language Arts Integrated

I borrowed an idea I saw from a teacher on Pinterest who had given everyone in her class "math bags". The object was for each child to bring back 5 items from home. Subsequently, the teacher put all of the objects into a pile and had her class divide them up into groups. I used a brown paper bag, and the only restriction was that they couldn't bring back any food items. The sorting and classifying took 2 days, as we also did a Venn diagram to label and explain why the objects had been sorted a particular way.

After removing the objects too large for the small paper plates, each student got to pick any 5 items (they didn't have to pick their own) and put them onto the plate already slathered with a thin layer of glue. The plates were allowed to dry overnight.

The next day each child filled out an I SPY paper using creative spelling. When that was done, I hung the plates out in the hallway, along with the papers, and parents-teachers-students got to see if they could pair up the paper with the plate.

You can get your copy of my I SPY template here.