Cinco de Mayo Fun!

Today we celebrated Cinco de Mayo. We ate tortilla chips and mango salsa. Then we played CINCO BINGO with numbers I called out.  (20 + 20 + 1 or 5 tens 3 ones or 1 quarter plus a dime) and kids had to figure out the numbers before they placed their bingo chip. They are getting good at this.

After about 3 games and 6 winners later, we read 2 Weekly Readers and read all the picture captions. Then we created a mariachi art project on a Mexican flag.   And sang a song to the tune of the ABCs.

We sing this song using percussion instruments!

 I had made up a spinner with Mexican words the kids might not know.  Then we read the book FIESTA (that is in an old literature series we still have in our closet at school_  It tells about how Mexican kids celebrate Cinco de Mayo in their community. After discussing some of the new vocabulary in the book we had kids come up and spin the vocabulary spinner. Then they had to use the word in a sentence. Everybody was great at it.

We did our vocabulary test this week using some of the Spanish Words we learned.

Then we passed out Mexican sombreros for art and some Oriental Trading stickers on the Mexican theme. They colored, cut out and decorated their sombreros.  We counted up to 10 three times in Spanish. Then I’d ask the kids “What is ocho, what is tres?” They loved it!

Here we are just before our 1st Grade Musical called “Seasons Change”
Boy did they do a fantastic job dancing the Maypole Spring dance!!!

While they were working I read them The Tortilla Factory. They loved eating their plates of tortilla chips and salsa with mango and peach. Mmmmmm….. Some years I buy a pinata or we make little ones out of brown paper bags and tissue paper with a donkey head. I usually fill the pinatas with colorful taffy. A cute book on pinatas is Curious George Pinata Party by H.A. Rey. It also has the spanish right along with the English words.

Everybody picked out 7 stickers to put on their hats.

We did the hats in red, green and yellow
The Mexican Hat Dance is one of the cute songs on the Dance CD

Lastly, we have to do the Mexican Hat Dance. I have a Dance Party CD that I use all the time for many holidays. It was a great purchase! And we make speech bubbles with “talking marks” of what the Mariachis were saying to one another and put them and our hats up on the bulletin board. We call the quotation marks 66 and 99 (the number words) in my class. Kids love to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.  Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!

One thought on “Cinco de Mayo Fun!”

  1. Hi there! Love all these ideas! Do you have a digital file of the boards you used to play CINCO? Also, do you have a template for the sombrero hat?
    Thanks so much for these ideas! Can't wait to use them 🙂

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