St. Patrick's Day

I love how this turned out. At first, I was quite frustrated with the fact that the color printer at the school was not working for a few days which meant I could not print and laminate my St. Patrick's Day games for the kiddos. However, it was changed for the UPSIDE!  Keep reading.


On St. Patrick's Day: (or closest day)
Wear lots of green (I love to wear crazy outfits on these days.) Students included of course~

Write a letter as a class to the leprechaun in case he comes to visit our classroom. We write a letter based on what we know about him. We informed him or asked him of something related to what we already knew. Our letter had to be short because it was taking too long for my students to do the writing.

Make their pots of gold filled with their treasures. I downloaded this template for free of TPT. I tweaked it a little to fit what I wanted to do for my class. St. Patrick's Day was on a Saturday, so this was a perfect activity for my Friday. The students wrote a list of their treasures in life. Then they glued gold coins on their pots for every treasure they wrote. This inspired a long list! (I laminated their pots because I thought their lists of treasures would be a great memory piece.)

Day after St. Patrick's Day (over the weekend in 2012):

Leprechaun messes up our classroom:
The kids come in and some things are a mess! The calendar is upside down, posters are upside down, and all our chairs are stacked which we never do!  Our color crayons on the cabinets are all over the classroom instead! There are a few other items. I immediately asked the kids why they made a mess. They swear it wasn't them, but I just don't believe them! They point out a letter left by the leprechaun. OH, THAT EXPLAINS IT! The kids didn't make a mess. To add to the fun, there are boot prints and a couple hand prints all over the classroom, showing where the leprechaun went running. To add to THAT FUN - all adults that enter my class CAN'T see the leprechaun foot prints and hand prints. This drive the kids NUTS! I just LOVE it! The next day, a few footprints aren't there anymore and then the next day they are all gone.

The leprechaun leaves us a GIFT!
Leprechaun's mess up things and trick us, that's just what they like to do. However, the leprechaun that visited our class wrote a little extra note telling us that he left us some games to play for the rest of the month! (It worked out perfectly to have games made up late... we could use them for a couple more weeks because the Leprechaun gave them to us.)  Mr. Leprechaun gave us green playdough because he loves green. He gave us yellow with gold sparkles to us to make gold coins for the pots. Playdough had GLITTER!

The leprechaun also left us supplies to make Leprechaun Juice! We just needed to write out the directions!






Other activities:

Writing:
How would you catch a Leprechaun?
What would you want to find at the end of a rainbow?
How to make Leprechaun Juice!

Reading:
The Little Leprechaun (A rebus story)
I'm a Little Leprechaun Poem
ar/oo gold coins

Art & Writing:
My Pot of Treasures (shown above)


Art and Sight Words:
Sight word Shamrock Surprise
Paint a rainbow

Math:
St. Patrick's Day Patterns
100 clovers
Pots of Gold - Students pick up some gold coins in 2 groups and then adds the coins together (recording sheet)
Rainbow coloring sheet: I wrote in color words to help them practice
Have you ever seen a Rainbow? graph

I found almost all of my printables on TPT... no time this time to make stuff myself. Plus so many great activities and games out there!