Spring Time Tutoring: Get Outside

It has been a long....cold...winter here at home.  It's about time for spring to decide to show up!  One of the best parts of being a tutor is that you can make things engaging and different every time a student comes.  I surprised one of my students with a tutoring session outside!  He was so excited.

I met him and his mom outside, he had a huge grin on his face.  The materials for the game we were going to play are simple to find.  You'll need chalk, a bean bad, and a subject to study like reading words.  I had my Word Study Lists and then I drew with chalk a Flip the Chip game board on my driveway.  You can download this awesome freebie below.  Inside it has game boards that are blank to print and some that are filled in too!

Flip the Chip

$0.00

Instead of using a printed game board, we drew it on the concrete with chalk and wrote "long a" words inside the circles.  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.

You could so some other phrases like:

Spring Time
Flowers and Grass
Blossoms on the Tree

How do you engage your students in an interesting way?