As the weather warms up, it feels like the school year moves at lightning speed! Before you know it, students will be home for the summer and you’ll be making plans for your next group of kindergarteners. It can be helpful to have some fun seasonal activities on hand to help your students keep their skills sharp over the upcoming long break. Keep reading for some of my favorite kindergarten activities for summer!
Ideas for Using Kindergarten Summer Activities
If you live somewhere with a long summer break, you might be wondering why you would need summer-themed kindergarten activities. Your students won’t be at school during the summer months! Here are just a few ideas of how you could use fun summer activities.
End-of-the-Year Party
An end-of-the-year party is always a great way to celebrate everything students have accomplished during the year. Fun summer-themed activities are the perfect addition to your party! You can have students rotate through a variety of seasonal activities during the festivities.
Summer School
If you’re teaching summer school or a jumpstart class, engaging summer-themed activities can come in handy! You can target specific skills using hands-on learning activities.
Kindergarten Round-Up
Does your school have a kindergarten round-up or meet the teacher event? You could have some summer-themed activities for students to do as part of a classroom tour or while their parents are filling out paperwork.
Summer Review
Engaging summer activities are a great way to prevent the summer slide. Students are able to review important skills that they learned over the course of the school year. The summer theme makes this review a little more fun!
Fun Summer Kindergarten Activities
No matter how you decide to use these summer activities, they will definitely be a helpful addition to your teacher toolbox!
1. Summer Literacy and Math Centers
Summer centers are a great way to help students review literacy and math skills at the end of the school year or over the summer.
For example, students can review rhyming words with this fun flip-flop themed activity. They will choose a task card with one flip flop containing a word, then find the matching flip flop with a rhyming word.
This sand bucket activity is another fun way to practice literacy skills with a summer twist! For this center, students will find the sand shovel with the middle sound that fills in the blank on each bucket.
This ice cream number sense activity is perfect for the beginning of the school year! Students will match the different representations of a number by stacking ice cream scoops onto each numbered cone.
Students can also keep their addition skills sharp in preparation for first grade with this summer center. Each ray of the sunshine is a different way to make the number shown on the center of the sun.
2. Kindergarten Summer Review Packet
A kindergarten summer review packet can help your students get ready for first grade! You can also use the fun printables from the review packet for low-prep activities whenever you need them!
For example, this summer dot-to-dot is perfect for those moments at the end of the school year when you have a few extra minutes.
Students can also practice drawing a crab during the morning routine at the end of the year or any other time you need a low-prep activity.
Whether you use these printables in your classroom or you send them home with your students, a summer review packet is a great resource to have on hand! It’s full of important skill review that will help your students start first grade with confidence.
3. Dot Painting
One of my favorite ways to help students practice fine motor skills is with crafts. This dot painting activity is so much fun that students won’t even realize they’re hard at work!
Students can use cotton swabs to paint each dot on the page according to the code provided. This is also a good way for students to practice identifying numbers and color words!
These summer pictures are a fun way to celebrate the end of the school year! You can easily incorporate these summer dot painting pages into a station at your class party. This could also be a good activity for the beginning of the year, when students still have warm weather and summer fun on their minds.
4. Summer Mystery Pictures
Students can never seem to get enough of these fun coloring puzzles! These summer mystery pictures are a pixel grid that students fill in with color according to a key.
The key can use a variety of different math or literacy skills, depending on the concepts you want your students to practice. For example, my summer mystery pictures are editable! You can type in any words you’d like your students to practice. This could be sight words, number words, or any particular phonics pattern you’d like.
5. Summer Puzzles
These fun summer-themed activities aren’t your typical jigsaw puzzle! Students assemble these summer puzzles like dominoes, with the bottom of one piece matching to the top of the next piece.
As students create this train of puzzle pieces, a summer-themed object will begin to appear. Students are always so excited to see the the puzzle take shape before their eyes!
These puzzles can help students practice literacy and math concepts like consonant blends, CVC words, ten frames, and addition. These are all skills that students can benefit from reviewing before they start first grade! You can send home these puzzles as a fun activity for students to complete over the summer or use them in your classroom. Either way, the practice will be fun and worthwhile for your students!
Free Summer Puzzles
If you’d like to use these summer puzzles in your kindergarten classroom, just fill out your information in the form below. I’ll send them directly to your inbox!
Save These Fun Kindergarten Activities for Summer
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