IT’S A BOY!
Howdy!
I just wanted to share a few snippets from our gender reveal party that we had with my first grade class last Friday. Although it was fun, it was still educational – even parties can have a curriculum.
Check it out!
This party was a blast and took a bit of planning, but I think it was all worth it. I tried to incorporate some “learning while partying” and the kids didn’t even seem to notice!
We started the day before by discussing the upcoming election, and what it means to vote. The kids learned about the election process and all the big words associated with voting (candidates, precinct, opinion, tallying, majority, etc.).
We set up our own precinct and they got to cast their vote for either boy or girl. My students were so serious about it and really took their voting rights to heart – it was precious! I told them that the next day (the day of the party) we would have a visit from the Supervisor of Elections (Mike) to officially count our votes and sign off on our class decision.
Kids love using their creativity and contributing to the decorations, so along with our voting the day before the party, each child was in charge of cutting out and decorating their own onesie to contribute to our “clothesline” garland. Before starting we brainstormed what types of items might be found on baby clothing and then I set them free.
They turned out so cute!
On the day of the party, we actually had four different “stations” set up to help with crowd control and keeping the kids interested in the task at hand.
- Subject Area: English/Grammar
The first station, manned by my room mom (who came wearing her support of “Team Blue”) was all about pronouns.
This idea (found on Pinterest) used Hershey’s candy bars, which hooked the kids right away, with the idea being to have the kids fill in the letters (using colored Sharpies) to form the pronouns he or she, depending on which gender they thought the baby was.
**hint – if you are planning to do this with a large group of kids, be sure to put a sticker on the back with their name (before starting), that makes it easy to pass them out at the end of the party!
We made a “bar” graph to highlight the results (pun intended).
- Subject Area – Language Arts
Visual Discrimination/Matching
The third station involved many language arts skills. This station was called “Name the Baby” and was one of the favorites.
A few weeks before the party I asked for all the parents to send in baby pictures of their children. I put them all on a foam board (including one of me and one of Mike) in random order and then numbered them.
The instructions were to match the number on the baby picture to the name of the student on the list. I thought this would be a quick and fun activity, but it actually took much longer than anticipated…the kids took this SO SERIOUSLY and were very deliberate with their choices.
I think it helped that they got to use clipboards – they felt like real detectives figuring out a mystery. So cute!
After they were finished, while waiting at their seats to either go to the next station or start decorating cupcakes, they had a baby word search to work on (don’t look at the misspelled word “botttle”…type-o by the teacher! Oops!).
Word searches are not only very educational, using visual discrimination and search/find tactics, but the kids enjoy them and treat it like a game. It’s a win/win!
Another station in our Language Arts subject area was one of my personal favorites – the Name Suggestion Box! Each child was asked to think of one girl name and one boy name to put in the suggestion box. I thought they would just put their own names, but that wasn’t the case – there was a lot of thought put into it!
Although there were some really goods ones, these were my favorites…
it’s a good thing we’re not having twin girls, Peaches and Peppermint would make pretty cute names, lol!
After finishing all of the stations and leading up to the actual reveal, it was time to eat. Thank goodness I have awesome parents that came to volunteer (they couldn’t wait to find out either) and donated not only their time, but also the food.
We feasted on cheese sticks (protein), strawberries (team girl) and blueberries (team boy). Each child also got to decorate a plain cupcake with the icing color of choice (pink or blue).
Sprinkles were in baby bottles with the top of the nipple cut off for easy shaking.
After all of the cupcakes were decorated, Mike showed up to help tally the votes (Math) and sign off on the election results (Social Studies). The boys took the vote 16-13.
Then it was time for the actual reveal. I don’t have any pictures of this part (it happened so fast), but I know many of the parents who were there captured the moment, so I will try to get some to share. One mom even took a video!!!
Anyway, here’s the synopsis:
Everyone was so excited and I was a bit nervous to reveal the answer even though it wasn’t a surprise to me! To reveal the gender, we each held a cupcake (Mike with blue and me with pink) in our hands and told the kids whomever bites into their cupcake was the “winner”.
The kids were on pins and needles and gave us to the count of 3. With a little trickery going back and forth between the two of us, he acted like he was going to take a bite of mine and then, he took a huge bite out of his blue cupcake. The kids went crazy and some of the parents even had tears!
It was so awesome to share it with so many special children and parents and I’m so relived I can finally say “he” out loud. It was torture keeping the secret!!!
Here’s to all things boy!!!
