Mardi Gras Kids’ Learning Activities for Hands-On Fun

These Mardi Gras kids’ activities all use leftover Mardi Gras beads for hands on fun!

We celebrate Mardi Gras here in our corner of Texas. It’s not as big as New Orleans, but oh my goodness it’s fun! For several years now, we’ve trekked down to Galveston Island for their daytime children’s parades. The kids love catching loads of shiny plastic bead necklaces thrown from the festive parade floats.

In the end, we always come home with an overwhelming mass of beads. The kids enjoy sorting them, trading them and playing dress up with them. Mardi Gras beads also turn out to be perfect for sneaking in some learning games.

Mardi Gras Kids’ ABC Activity

We pulled out our beads and formed them into letters. We started with broken strands, but soon found a few ways to use unbroken ones as well. Kids working on letter recognition and learning how to form letters will have a lot of fun with this hands on Mardi Gras bead learning activity.

Mardi Gras Kids’ Reading Activity

For slightly older kids, like mine, you can use your leftover Mardi Grad beads to practice reading and spelling. If you try it, make sure you have plenty of floor space to spread out.

More Mardi Gras Kids’ Learning Ideas

• Reward tokens – If you have a huge pile of beads like we do, hand out one necklace for every word spelled correctly, math fact answered accurately, etc. If you have a smaller bead stash, you may like to give some other kind of token for every correct answer. Then, let the kids trade in a certain number of those tokens to get a necklace.

• Counting activity – Count how many individual beads are on a strand, or count how many necklaces you have in all. How many if you add or take away a necklace?

• Sorting & Graphing – Sort by color, size, etc. Make a graph of how many you have of each.

• Writing – For kiddos at the list-making stage of beginning writing, have them list their favorite colors of Mardi Gras beads.

• Shapes – Challenge little ones to form shapes instead of letters.

• Science – Practice making predictions and using a scale – weigh one necklace and estimate what all of your necklaces weigh.

Parade day is around the corner. My kids are excited to load up on even more beads. I may be drowning in them soon!

For even more fun Mardi Gras kids’ ideas you may like to check out what I’ve collected on my Mardi Gras Pinterest board.

Want to save these ideas? The picture below is just right for pinning. Have fun!