Columbus Day is Coming!

Teaching young children about Christopher Columbus can be fun and exciting. Not only can you teach children about Christopher Columbus, but you can also build in many science, social studies, language arts, and math standards. When you teach your kids about Christopher Columbus, there are two different ways you can approach the topic:

All in One Day

Or..A Little Each Day

All In One Day is a "blow out" day. We completely forgo our regular schedule and the whole day is about Christopher Columbus. It is a crazy day, but it is one my kids talk about all year. By doing it this way, it is something different and unique. The brain loves novelty!

Or...A Little Each Day. In this format, you could do a different activity each day stretched out over the week.

Here are some of the activities we use to celebrate Christopher Columbus.

 Here are the float and sink activities that we did. The children made predictions, checked their predictions, and made their bottle books!

For this game, the children rolled a dice and moved the boats toward the water. They can move one boat or divide the roll between two or three boats.
This is our earth! The kiddos painted “land” on the sphere and on the back made a circle map of things that are spheres.

This was the highlight…to say the least! The kiddos had so much fun making the coke floats! This was a fun way to teach predictions, doing the experiment, and graphing the results of the experiment!

Here is where we made an all about Christopher Columbus Book! They loved the toilet paper roll telescopes! The chart is one that I found on someone else’s blog that they used while making the book.

Here is where we made a large Santa Maria and then each child made their own. We were working on labeling.


We talked about characteristics of Christopher Columbus and then the children drew and wrote about their connections. Then we shared them with our buddies.

Here are some photos from where some other bloggers posted pictures from the packet! Love to see how people use things a little differently!
All of these activities are from the Hooray for Columbus Day Unit. What are you planning for Columbus Day? Do you have a blog post about Columbus Day? If so, leave a comment with a link to your post! Would love to see them as we will actually have time to do it now BEFORE Columbus Day!