Leprechauns, Gold and Shamrocks: St. Patrick's Day Fun

St. Patrick's Day brings us Leprechauns, gold, and shamrocks. Here are some of the fun activities we are doing to celebrate this magical day.

Do You Believe in Leprechauns?

The kids absolutely love doing survey graphs. Why? Because they get to talk to their friends!
Here's how we did our survey graph:

• First, the children move around the room asking their friends if they believe in Leprechauns.
• They put tally marks in either the yes or no column.
• Then, they create a graph to show the results.
• Last, the analyze their data.

Finding Gold Sight Word Game

I love games that can be used over and over again. Swat is one of those games. You can put anything on the cards and anything on the fly swatters and you have a new game. All you have to do is change the standard and change the clip art and the kids think it is a new game.
To play the game:

• Spread the cards on the flower.
• Give several children each a fly swatter.
• Tell them the target word.
• They seek for the word.
• When they find the word, the leprechaun gathers the gold.

Cut a Sentence--Do You Have Gold?

Cut a sentence books are great for teaching sentence structure. The kids learns that the word with the capital letter goes first, the word with the period goes last. They also learn to use the reading strategy, "Does it make sense?" Invite the kids to move the remaining words until the sentence makes sense. Then, they find the picture to match the sentence.

Sharing Gold

This is a fun way to teach fair share:

• Invite the children to roll a dice and count out that many pieces of gold.
• Gather the Leprechaun's Pots of Gold game board.
• The children share the gold so that each pot gets an equal amount of gold.
• Last, the kids record their results on the recording page.

How to Catch a Leprechaun?

Here's how we made our paper plate leprechauns:

• First, the kids paint the paper plate. Allow to dry.
• Using pompoms, wiggly eyes, and paper, create a face.
• Add hair. We used the crinkle paper you can find in the gift wrapping section of the dollar store.
• Add the hat to the top.

• Staple the paper plate leprechaun to several sheets of paper.
• Invite the children to write the steps for how to catch a leprechaun.

Can We Make Green?

St. Patrick's Day is a great day to explore color mixing.  Here's what we did:

• Give each child a Ziploc bag.
• Put shaving cream in each bag.
• In 1/3 of the bag put red and yellow food coloring, in 1/3 put red and blue food coloring and in the final 1/3 put blue and yellow food coloring.
• Zip the top of the bag closed.

• Invite the children to mix their colors together.
• Which colors made green?

• The children record the results on the recording page.

Shamrock Shakes

The highlight of the day is making Shamrock Shakes!
To make the shakes:

• Give each child a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
• Add "green" sprite-leprechaun juice.
• Invite the kids to mix them together.
• Add rainbow sprinkles to the top.

• Now it's time to drink our Shakes!

• As a follow up, we invited the children to sequence the pictures of how we made the shakes.
• Now, they wrote the steps to match each picture.

• Or, you could do a guided writing lesson where you and the children work together to record the steps.

• Or the children could sequence the pictures in a booklet.
• On each page, they cut apart a sentence and put the words in order.

St. Patrick's Day Parade

To create a St. Patrick's Day parade here is what we did:

• Invite the children to spin the spinner.
• Whichever picture it lands on, the children locate that clip art and add it to the parade.
• Keep spinning until all of the squares are filled. (They can land on the same thing more than once.)
• Sequence the ordinal number cards.
• Find black and white clip art to match the parade.
• Invite the children to glue the clip are to match their parade.
• Label each with the ordinal position.

These ideas are from this unit.

This unit was recently updated. If you already own this unit, go to your my purchases section and you can download the updated version.