It’s March, a tough time for teachers–no vacations, looming standardized tests, and distractible students. For the kids, all it takes is one warm day, and spring fever kicks in!

How can we keep our students focused on learning this time of year?

One approach is to review skills you taught last fall. For many in your class, those lessons are a distant memory, and now is a good time to brush up on them. Going over strategies your students have already learned adds to their competence — and confidence.

In early spring, you also still have time before the end of the year to introduce brand new concepts to your group. Children can now read and write better than they could in the fall, so they are ready to apply those competencies to learning new things, such as alphabetizing, counting syllables, and sorting words.

My favorite activities during any season are ones that are so engaging that kids don’t even know they are learning from them. I call them learning-in-disguise activities.

One such activity is making small words out of larger ones. I bet you remember doing this when you were young. How many words can you find, for example, in CONTINENTAL? I used to love that challenge, and had no idea at the time how much I was learning about the phonetic composition of words. My version has a useful worksheet for writing words according to how many letters they have. This technique helps youngsters to think about how words are spelled and reinforces phonics knowledge.

For learning in disguise, you can do no better than the popular grammar activity, Noun Town, where children match noun images and words, and place them on a map. Building a noun town develops sight word reading, decoding, word awareness, vocabulary, and background knowledge. My Noun Town family of resources includes Verb Burg, Adjectives in Noun Town, and Noun Towns for every season–of course, including Noun Town in Spring.

Those are a few of the Many Roads to Reading spring-themed activities. So never fear about your students getting spring fever! You have plenty of ways to keep them engaged and learning!