St. Patrick’s Day – Patties Classroom

St. Patrick’s Day LEPRECHAUNS

This week is St. Patrick’s Day. So we did some LEPRECHAUNS! These were the ones we did last year. But this years are even bigger and better! And very GREEN!

I like to make cards for some of the holidays we celebrate. These always turn out cute. The handprints are orange paint. Then a die cut peach circle glued and the faces made by the kids. Top with a black hat, green strip of paper and a yellow square. The black inside part of the buckle is just made with black marker. Oh, and don’t forget the wiggly eyes.

Then we choose from 3 kinds of stationery and write cards to our parents.

Some really fun St. Patrick’s Day Pinwheels can be found HERE at Craft Jr. It is one of my favorite sites for crafts. This one was milk and food coloring and a little DAWN dish detergent on the end of a toothpick. It will fizzle the milk pretty good if you only touch here and there in the areas of the food coloring.

Here we are doing it in my class but watch the video below to see how it’s done. I use toothpicks and only touch the very edges one at a time of the dots of food coloring. It will fizz and last longer.

They are cool rainbow experiments to go along with your Pots of Gold! Check it out HERE to find out how to make green Leprechaun Quicksand (Oobleck).

I made this Leprechaun and Shamrock BINGO last year for the kids to play at a center. They use the green glittery shamrocks as counters. It is filled with lots of cool vocabulary.

Gotta play a few games of Irish Bingo for St. Patrick’s Day!

And we ALWAYS make leprechaun trap inventions. They are very cool and we show them off in the school library for a week. Kids have lots of fun trying to “LURE” a leprechaun to our class. I’ll post them on Friday when they are due along with some of our writing leprechaun metaphor writings.

And we graph our favorite type of potatoes in math. It could be potato chips that win this year! That’s my downfall…..sigh…..

Happy St. Patricks Day!

St. Patrick’s Day Leprechaun Traps

We are playing this fun game in P.E. this week. It’s like 4 corners only there are 6 charms! Similar
icons are put around the room in 6 areas. Kids choose and area, I roll the dice, and the kids in the one landing on top
are OUT! We keep rolling till we have one winner who gets a little gummy bear treat.

We are also working on making Leprechauns, and pots of gold, and writing about a Person We Treasure.

They go nicely with our beautiful rainbow pots of gold. They are made from 1 x 12 inch strips of red, orange, yellow, green blue and purple paper then glued to a black pot. We added a clip art picture of gold pieces to the top.

Then we wrote Leprechaun similes…they are a type of metaphor. A Leprechaun is as _____ as a _____. If I caught one I would_____ and my 3 wishes would be_______. They turned out cute. I’ll post some of them soon.

Here’s the letter I sent home for the Leprechaun Trap inventions assignment….

For St. Patrick’s Day we made some Leprechaun Trap!!. I hope some of these can catch a leprechaun for one of the kids!

This was a cool obstacle course the little guy would travel through before getting trapped in the box.

I loved this one so much. A lot of time went into painting pictures for the walls
of this “All You Can Eat Buffet!”

Wouldn’t you love to go to a Leprechaun buffet? Yeah….me too! There
were flashing green lights inside as well as lovely tables and chairs to sit and dine!

HERE at One Charming P arty is a cute candy bag topper for St. Patrick’s Day. It’s cute so go check it out.

Cute and glittery tube trap….walk up the ladder, slide down into the tube….gotcha!

Do you think he’ll trap one in the big, green, bag? I hope so!

This one looked similar to a mailbox. Super cute! Loved the scary signs too.

Here was another one that lit up with lights….so glittery and cool, but you KNOW those
leprechauns aren’t going to obey the signs posted, are they?

HERE at Family Fun is a cute St. Patrick’s Day Treasure Hunt printable. It has a rhyme for the first clue to go look under your bed. I think I might try this for my grandkids to do next time they come over. It sounds really fun.

This one had some real Lucky Charms cereal added to the black pot….lots of enticing stickers too….very cute!

Loved the artistic rainbow and the Lucky Charms guy too!

In this Labyrinth of tape one might get caught…..mmmhmmm……

Or this Disneyland playland for Leprechauns! Look at all the holes he might fall through!

Loved the name on the fun house…..Rainbow Palace….so cute!

We decided to have lots of signs that said the opposite of what we wanted….because we all
know that sneaky leprechauns don’t follow signs or rules, do they?

Loved the wooden ladder and how that tiny guy will just slide right down into a TRAP!
Good Work!

Just because it is tiny, doesn’t mean it can’t trap a Leprechaun!

We loved the shamrocks made of pipe cleaners on this one, and the creative ladder. This one
also had some Lucky Charms Cereal to entice a little green man to come fall inside!

Climb on up, slide right down. Don’t pay attention to the Do Not Enter sign!

This was a real mousetrap! Climb up, crawl through the tunnel, then , OOPS! Trapped in the tube!

You can’t even see it but there is a secret hole under all that green grass on top, good job!

Pretty rainbow slide and lots of cute stickers too, not to mention the advertising of GOLD!

This was a pretty silvery trap with a black pot of gold on top!

Do you think the pot or the green carnation will trip him up? I wonder…..

This cute girl did a Leprechaun dollhouse, complete with bed, table and chairs. She’s gonna
keep him for awhile to decide on 3 perfect wishes……

We had a great time inventing traps for Leprechauns for St. Patrick’s Day! Wish us luck, or for a bunch of lucky 3 wishes….or……well….. something like that. Anyways, have a Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

St. Patrick’s Day!

Leprechauns and Pots of Gold

Hello, First 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!

While my students were at lunch recess, naughty little leprechauns came in and turned over some chairs and made a trail of glitter to my desk. We even saw some green glitter footprints! Did YOU get a visit from a leprechaun today?

Our WEEKLY GRAPH this week was on…..something Irish…..guess what? Of course we graphed our favorite kinds of POTATOES!!. What are yours? We chose from:

French Fries
Mashed Potatoes
Baked Potatoes with butter
Hash Brown Potatoes
Potato Chips

Guess Which one was the Winner?

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!

Mrs. Moss came up with the pots of gold to
“trap” a leprechaun. We only had to design the various “traps”. Then we shared them with the whole school in our school library…..but we took home our pots of gold!

Here was Peter’s trap…very creative “sticky path”

Leprechaun Traps Letter that went home…

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!

Trace’s trap….climb up the lego ladder, Uh Oh…look out!

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

Then when he gets inside she’s gonna konk him on the head with the cloud covered box! Zowie!

Even though it said Do Not Enter, guess who entered?

Then guess who cut a hole and escaped? Prison Break! Those tricky leprechauns!

Rainbow IDEAS

Mosaic rainbow- Children glue paper squares and cotton ball clouds on to rainbow pattern. Or have kids paint hand prints in all of the colors and in a shape of the rainbow.We also made pots of gold with rainbows attached. Or just cut out white clouds or use a white paper plate folded and add streamers in the 6 colors of the rainbow. Go out and check the wind direction by how your streamers blow.

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 “word bingo”. The kids can do this one again at a center, they will just choose a caller. It’s super fun. They all got into it!

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!

We also made leprechaun wheels with math facts each child wrote down individually. Some students did multiplication facts they want to memorize, others did addition or subtraction facts. My challenge to them was to write down ones they did not already know by heart.

Math facts wheels, some of the kids did Multiplications! Woo Hoo!

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.

SCIENCE
Make some 3D “Rainbow” glasses. Use cardboard shapes of glasses. I had some I just copied onto card stock. Then give kids some red and blue permanent markers and have them color an “eye” shape that will fit over the glasses out of overhead clear acetate, 1 in blue and 1 in red. Then cut them out and tape them inside the glasses. If you need a tutorial I found one HERE. I’ve bought many 3D books over the years so it’s fun to make these glasses on St. Patrick’s Day. We ran out of time so we’ll have to do them next week.

RAINBOW SCIENCE EXPERIMENT
Another fun science I do is use my beakers and do some “color 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
Another art I do some years is a cute leprechaun face. 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.

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

Lucky Leprechaun art….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!

Handprint painting for the Leprechaun parent cards…

Look Mom! Here’s our hands! (prints that is…)

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

Leprechaun Music and P.E. Games

We did St. Patrick’s Day for 2 days this year. We spent the first day doing language arts and math activities. the 2nd day we did Science, P.E. and a fun Word Bingo game. Here are the P.E. games we’ve done this whole week and some silly songs. This would go great typed up on the back of our math facts wheels we did for math. Too bad I didn’t think of it till now. 😀

I found a cute teacher blog idea with a baggie of colored licorice and some gold coins for a cute leprechaun treat and the label toppers can be found in this LINK here and HERE at the It is what it is blog. I loved it….so cute!

Leprechaun poems on our calendar wall…

Emma’s workin on her math facts wheel…

P.E. Games
I’m in charge of P.E. for this month in the first grade so we will do a few fun games in the gym. One is called Hide the Shamrock. Cut out one shamrock shape. Hide it in the room. Have a chair in the center of the room. The children should look for the shamrock, then the first child to find the shamrock sits in the chair. The child in the chair then goes to get the shamrock, the other children hide their eyes and the child hides the shamrock, and the process is restarted.

More St. Patrick’s Day Games

Another fun game is called Lucky Charms. It is played like “Fruit Basket”. Have each student sit in a chair in a circle. Give each child a name 1. Horseshoes, Clovers, Hearts, Diamonds, Moons. Then have 1 child in the center call out one of the 5 shapes. All those kids that are that 1 shape have to switch places. The student in the middle goes to find one of the chairs. So there is 1 less chair and one will be the odd man out. They do the 2nd round by standing in the middle and calling out a new shape. If you call out Lucky Charms, all the kids change places. That’s super fun. Only rule is you MUST move to a new chair you can’t stay put.

Matt’s writing his Happy St. Patrick’s Day letter….

Song is sung to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot”

A third game is 4 Corners. Get 2 of the Tropicana 1/2 gallons of orange juice and use them up and rinse them out. Cut each of them off to look like the bottom is a square. Then slit the sides a little and push both bottoms together to make a cool looking cube. It will make a very sturdy DICE.

Fun St. Patrick’s Day Games…

Cover each of the 6 sides with green construction paper. Or use the colors of the rainbow; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. Then I find a clip art of the Lucky Charms symbols;purple horseshoe, pink heart, orange star, yellow moons, green clovers, red hearts. Then tape them up to the sides real good with book tape. It will look kind of laminated.

Leprechaun game is laminated with lots of book tape….

The game is played just like 4 corners only I have the middle of the room be the 5th corner and the stage at school is the 6th corner (since the dice have 6 sides). I call out “Choose your corner!” and they go to one of the places and each is marked with a paper having corresponding picture to the dice side. One corner is purple diamond, one corner is pink heart, yellow moon, green horseshoe, etc. Then I roll the big dice. It is fun to watch it roll around before it stops. The picture showing on top is the group that is OUT! They take their places on the circle in the middle of the room and watch the action. It’s a really fun game.

My daughter made this wonderful rainbow cake for her daughter’s birthday.

Isn’t it an amazing Rainbow cake? I had to include it…She is so amazing!

Here’s my little Granddaughter Megan with her Birthday cake! So cute!

I hope you enjoyed our St. Patrick’s Day activities! Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I hope you all find the pot of gold at the end of your rainbows. Or just get a cool rainbow birthday cake this year. : ()
Pattie