Mother's Day is this week and I have a hard time with this holiday in the upper elementary grades if I am being honest. Many of the projects and activities I have seen are perfect for lower grades, but a little too simplistic and cute for my grades. That got me thinking about what I love for Mother's Day. One big thing is words....words mean a lot.
My 3rd-5th graders are getting older and have developed skills for putting things into words. So, I decided to put together a little booklet with my class that moms can cherish for a lifetime. A book filled with kind words from the loves of their lives...their children.
I decided that I would have the students use many of the same writing skills we have learned over the course of the year. First, they will create an acrostic poem using the word mom or some other variation, depending on what they usually call their mother. Next, they will create a portrait of their mom through their eyes, using what we have learned this year about drawing portraits.
Students will also use their descriptive skills to create a descriptive paragraph about mom.
Another part of this project is for each student to write a thank you letter to their mom thanking her for all the things she has done for them. Students will then create a narrative based on their favorite memory of their moms. There is an all about page that asks students to fill in the blanks to sentence stems like, favorite thing mom cooks, what I love about you, and Mom always says. The final part is an opinion piece about why their mom is the very best mom in the world.
If this doesn't touch a mother's heart and bring happy tears to her eyes, I don't know what will. Moms are amazing and they deserve to be celebrated through thoughtful words. They don't often hear the positives. This will be such a fun surprise for every mom in my classroom.
You can check out all the details over here if you are interested in learning more. To save more, you can find the combo pack for Mother's Day and Father's Day for a discount here.
