Leprechauns and St. Patrick’s Day

Leprechauns and Pots of Gold 

 

Hello, 2nd Graders I’m Lucky I am

I was here and gone as fast as you can

I’m little and tough and so hard to find

so don’t try to catch me just never mind!

I left you some treats In your classroom Sooooooo,

Get busy looking for them, Ready, set, GO!

Cute St. Patrick’s Day Leprechaun Books I’ve purchased 

This Night Before St. Patrick’s Day has the same pattern as The Night Before Christmas! 
Our WEEKLY GRAPH next week will be on…..something Irish…..guess what? Of course we’ll graph our favorite kinds of POTATOES!!. What are yours? We chose from:
  1. French Fries
  2. Mashed Potatoes
  3. Baked Potatoes with butter
  4. Hash Brown Potatoes 
  5. Potato Chips
You will have to sait and see which one  was the Winner! This is last year’s graph! 

Writing:  Journals- 1. How would you catch a leprechaun? We shared with the class our great ideas. Then we shared our homework….

Leprechaun Traps!  We were very inventive! We made our leprechaun traps this week and share them during Conference Week. We share them with the whole school by leaving them in the library! Come see them! 

Mrs. Moss came up with the “gold” to
“trap” a leprechaun. We only had to design the various “traps”.  


Here was the “optional project” directions I sent home.

 Leprechaun Traps Letter that went home..

Here are some from past years…..Addie’s trap….leprechaun falls through the hole in the “grass” oops

Emma’s trap….leprechaun climbs up the ladder, slides down the tube! Trapped! 



Allie entices her leprechaun in with a FREE all you can eat buffet! Too cute!

Leprechaun Writing Projects……

They came up with some really good adjectives….which is what I was hoping for! 

Leprechaun Similes……a type of metaphor……
March Book Reports….

Pots of Gold, Book Reports, and Leprechauns….made a cute bulletin board. 
Green as Clover….Yup that’s a Leprechaun! 

I thought “Keen as a Wolf” was very creative writing! Yup! 

My Classroom March Bulletin Board….so CUTE! I love St. Patrick’s Day! 

Cute March Book Reports….the kids gave them a penny, a dime, or a dollar RATING! 

Chapter Book Reports and Leprechaun Art Projects! This Leprechaun has a wicked “I’m up to no good” grin! 

March Book Reports turned out cute. Gotta Love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! 
Leprechaun Love! 
MATH BINGO
A fun “Lucky” Bingo game I found was at the dltk WEBSITE HERE!   I also found some cute art ideas on another Teachers First website. The link is HERE.  I made up a bunch of these on light green card stock. If we played the math side of the game I would always say, 6 tens and 3 ones for them to figure out the number. Sometimes I would say it backwards 3 ones and 6 tens. Or I would add ten to a number or subtract 10 from  a number and they had to figure it out mentally. The opposite side I did Irish “Vocabulary Word bingo”. The kids can do this one as a fun center on St. Patrick’s Day.

Irish Bingo Game is fun and on the back is a LUCKY math 100s board game. 

Lucky Irish Bingo 

MATH
Another individual and fun math activity is graphing the marshmallow shapes that come in the Lucky Charms cereal. I give each student a little cup of cereal and they graph their shapes on the worksheet. A link to make a copy is HERE. It is from Tooter4kids.  I added some math to the page such as add up the horseshoe and heart shapes. Or subtract the least number of shapes you have from the greatest number of shapes. The kids learn the math vocabulary better the more we use it. Are any of your shapes equal in number?

Graphing with Lucky Charms Marshmallow shapes.

Lucky Charms Math ……always fun

WRITING: Opinion pieces about “A Person I Treasure” will be our writing project for the week.o Tell what makes this person so special to you…..give 3 reasons why they are one of your favorite people you treasure!

SCIENCE
I love to have the kids learn about Roy G. Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) and the order of the rainbow colors. We look at some glass  prisms on the overhead that show rainbows in a cool way. Then we make a rainbow using 1 inch by 10 inch strips of colored construction paper glued together and then glued onto the back of a black pot. We color a tiny leprechaun and I give them some shamrocks. This year I found some cute green blingy/shiny ones from Hobby Lobby, and they glued those down. Then I top the pot with some fake gold coins. Here’s our finished “Pots of Gold” at the ends of the rainbows.

RAINBOW SCIENCE EXPERIMENT
Another fun science I do is use my beakers and do somecolor change” science. A fun experiment is using a bowl of milk and dropping 2 blobs of food coloring into the bowl in 4 different colors.  Then take a tiny speck of Dawn dish washing liquid on the end of a toothpick and stick it on the edge of the milk. It should show a fizzy chemical change. Then dot another far corner of the milk. Don’t dot right into the food coloring.
Do it a few more times. You should have about 5 minutes of fizz in the experiment. It’s really cool, easy, and cheap.

This is after about about 5 minutes and a few kids had bumped the bowl…

 It will start a chemical reaction that will “fizz” the milk. It’s really a cool rainbow affect. The kids want to go nuts with the toothpick but don’t let them or it ruins the effect. A tiny bit goes a long way and will make the reaction last longer if you stick it in one area of the bowl each minute and then watch and wait.

St. Patrick’s Day Activities

LEPRECHAUN ART
We made some CUTE Leprechauns!  For beards and the hair I have the kids curl the strips of 1/2 inch construction paper around a marker so it will curl up like a Santa beard. The hat is green, then we add a 1 inch strip of black around for the ribbon and a yellow square for a buckle, and add glitter to it after school. Here is our finished bulletin boards.

The black ribbon is 2 x 12, just fold it around the hats. The face is about 10 inch oval in manilla colored paper. The yellow buckle is 2 x 3 and the kids just draw a square in the middle with black marker. We then put glue and gold glitter around it. We add wiggly eyes, pink circle (cut out) nose and eyebrows and mouth with marker.

We curl orange strips for beard and use orange crimped packaging for hair…

Lucky Leprechaun art….some years I’ve used dots are stickers…
March  bulletin board…. Type up some poems or songs to go on the back…

Gotta love a leprechaun with a rainbow pot of gold…..the more glitter the better!

MUSIC
A fun song  we sing  is L U C K Y and it is sung just like the B I N G O Song and tune.  I know a chap with a fuzzy beard and LUCKY is his name-O. (spell) Lucky, Lucky, Lucky and Lucky is his name-O. He hides his gold at the rainbow’s end and Lucky is his name-O. Lucky Lucky, Lucky and Lucky is his name-O.
This would go great typed up on the back of our giant art leprechauns. I like to do art with poetry and sing or read it for shared reading time.  Happy St. Patties Day to you from me!  

My grand daughters in their “Lucky” shirts