Let's Have a Lemonade Tasting (A Fun End of Year Experience) 9 comments End of Year, Freebies, Lemonade Day, Lemonade Tasting Today we had a Lemonade Tasting, and it was so much fun! I typically do several themed days at the end of the year. We've run out of curriculum, the kids are in summer mode, and it's an easy way to keep them engaged with meaningful learning up until the end. So, what goes into a lemonade tasting? Let's find out! As the students walked in to the room today, they were greeted with these pink and yellow ribbon streamers. To attach them to the door frame, I simply taped them with Scotch tape. Nothing fancy, I promise. Then, I taped a few lemon slice cut outs to the ends of a few pieces of the ribbon. You can grab the lemon cut outs HERE. We started the day by making new words from the words "cold lemonade." Some really great words they came up with include "noodle," "candle," and "melon." This got them ready for the next thing: the lemonade tasting! We headed outside to our courtyard where I served the students small portions of pink and yellow lemonade. Small, as in, those are bathroom sized cups. ;) To add a bit of novelty to this experience, I made drink tickets for the students to cash in when they grabbed their lemonade. This actually helped make sure the process remained orderly. As a student approached the table, he/she dropped his/her ticket in the provided bucket and then grabbed the matching drink. They loved their little tickets! After the tasting, we came inside and conducted a whole group poll to find out which flavor of lemonade was most popular. The students graphed the results and then answered some questions about their graph. I gave each student a wristband (card stock cut into strips and labeled "Team Pink" and "Team Yellow") to represent their favorite drink. This helped them to be consistent during the poll. Second graders sometimes forget their choice when participating in activities like this. Hehe. Plus, they thought it was pretty cool to sport their paper bracelet for the day. You can grab the drink tickets and bracelet templates HERE. After graphing our favorite picks, the students brainstormed words to describe their favorite lemonade and then wrote opinion pieces about which lemonade they liked best. The opinion pieces were written in these super fun shape books. After all that sitting and writing, it was time to get up and move a bit! We played a game of I Spy. We used these lemonade themed money word problem task cards to review our problem solving (and money counting) skills. Finally, we practiced our parts of speech skills by completing this lemonade themed word sort. Some of the words really got them thinking and it was fun to hear them talk it out with their teaching buddies. The question of the day was whether they should put "drink" in the noun or verb category. It was so great to hear them think it out. Ultimately, they decided it went with the verbs so that each category would have an equal number of words. So logical! (But, for the record, I would have accepted its placement in either category). Our Lemonade Tasting was lots of fun! The kids absolutely loved it! Best of all, they were engaged in all of the activities and didn't even realize that they were still learning! All of these activities, plus more can be found in my Let's Have a Lemonade Tasting! pack on TPT. What are your favorite end of year themes? DON'T FORGET IT, PIN IT! Share It: