Theme Week: Fun Ways to Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day With Your Child!
The month of March has a lot going on. Winter weather winds down, and the temperatures go up. Trees and flowers bloom. Many animals have their babies. Schools let out for spring break. Outside sports start up. For avid basketball fans, March Madness takes place. And then there is the holiday that has people practicing their Irish accents and eating green foods.
St. Patrick’s Day!
I admit that until this year, I’ve never done any activities with the kiddos for this particular holiday. We usually have other things going on, and besides eating (and wearing!) green, there aren’t many ways for young children to celebrate. But this year I decided to have some good-luck fun with the four-year-old. So here are the activities that I put together:
Skittles Science
Along with the color green, four-leaf clover, and leprechauns, St. Patrick’s Day is full of rainbows that lead to pots of gold. Kids love rainbows. So we created a rainbow for our science lesson using Skittles! There are so many experiments and activities you can do with the colorful candy. As we discovered with this week’s lesson, Skittles can also be dissolved in water, adding to the possibilities.
I decided to try the density experiment I found here. All that we needed were:
- A glass jar (we used a small drinking glass)
- Water
- Cups or bowls (enough for each color of candy to have its own)
- Eyedroppers
- Skittles in varying amounts (2 of one color, 4 of another, 6 of a third, and so on)
Dissolve the candies in a small amount of water. It took a little over an hour for them to completely dissolve. I stirred them occasionally to speed up the process. Once liquified, we took turns using the eyedroppers to slowly add each color to the glass. We started with the one that had the most Skittles in it, which was purple, and ended with the color that had only two, which was red.
Unfortunately, our yellow, green, and orange mixed together some. But we could still see the purple on the bottom and the red on top with the others in between. It didn’t quite look like a rainbow, but I still used it to explain the differences in weight (density) causing the layers of color. We also plan to do this experiment again over spring break to see if we can figure out how to get all of the colors to stay separate.
Rainbow Art
We also made some creative rainbows with two craft activities.
Salt Art
The first art project used paper, glue, water, food coloring, and salt. Yes, salt. I’ve seen this creation before, but you can find detailed instructions here. Simply let the kids squeeze lines of glue all over the paper. It can just be swirls, shapes, or letters. One of my girls even wrote her initials in glue.
Sprinkle regular table salt all over the glue much like you would do with glitter. Make sure all of the glue is covered and shake off the excess. I suggest letting the glue dry some, but you don’t necessarily have to. Mix the food coloring into some water. I used cake decorating liquid paintbrushes. Each brush had a different color in it. You can also use small cups or bowls with eyedroppers.
Drop or paint the salt pictures. It doesn’t take much to color the salt, and try not to let your child use a lot as that soaks into the paper. It can be all one color or a mixture. You can even leave part of it white. One of ours ended up with a tie-dye pattern.
Let them finish drying, and you have a sparkly rainbow picture to display! I will note that when completely dry, some of the salt fell off our pictures. Just shake off the excess before hanging the picture.
Fingerprint Rainbow
The second craft we did was a fingerprint rainbow. I found a template here. You do not have to have a template to make this craft, though. Just get a blank piece of paper, some paint, and your little one’s fingers! Help your child dip his or her finger into the paint and place prints on the paper in an arc.
We used to template so that he had the lines to show him where to put his fingerprints. He doesn’t get to do finger painting very often because we usually use brushes. It took him several seconds to catch on to what he should do. But once he did, he took off with it! He shouted out the next color as I poured it out for him.
By the third row, I no longer needed to show him where to start. The lines helped keep the shape despite his finger not always getting exactly where it should every time. He loved it, and it brought out his creativity so that he painted a color-mixing picture right after!
Letters
Usually I teach one letter for the week that associates with our theme. This week, however, I didn’t think that the four-year-old would benefit from learning either S or P for St. Patrick’s Day. So instead I searched for a general alphabet activity. I found quite a variety such as letter finds, letter tracing, and upper-lower case matching. There were pages using gold coins, shamrocks, and rainbows.
I decided on a fun color-by-letter for our lesson. It’s similar to the popular color-by-number, but it uses letters! The picture I used came from here. There is a picture broken into sections, and at the top are corresponding letters with colors for those sections.
Because he cannot read yet, I highlighted the names of the colors with markers. He practiced recognizing both the letters and the colors. Then he found each letter and colored in those sections. It was simple, fun, and he ended up with a bright picture of a leprechaun, which led to a flabbergasting child-friendly conversation about how we celebrate the holiday. He just couldn’t believe that people ate green food, drank green drinks, and wore green all in one day!
Numbers
Speaking of green, another fun way to celebrate is to search for those rare but lucky four-leaf clovers. We see a lot of clover around here, but not many that have that extra leaf. So for our number recognition activity this week, I hid some four-leaf clovers around the house, each with a number on them. He had to find one, tell me the number, and then go find the next.
It was time consuming but easy to create the shapes. I found an outline that I traced onto green construction paper that I then cut out. You could also draw your own if you’re artistically inclined. I will provide a downloadable sheet of blank clovers at the end of the post for those who are short on time.
I simply taped them to walls, counters, the couch, a jacket – random places with some easy to find and others hidden well. He found the first one right away. Then within minutes, he found four more. I did not make him find them in chronological order, but that could be an added challenge to stretch it out some. And the game prepares both the children and the parents for the upcoming Easter egg hunts…
Additional Math Activity
We did a second math lesson this week, this time using picture patterns. I printed a page of patterns and extra pictures from here. Though something kids usually learn in PreK, I let the kiddo cut out the extra pictures himself. He then glued each picture at the end of the row to finish the patterns.
The pattern we used came from the subscribers’ page, but there are plenty of options on the same website as well as others. Here are just a few:
Conclusion
We had so much fun celebrating St. Patrick’s Day all week. I hope you and your kiddos can enjoy these activities as well. Share your experience in the comments below!
FOUR LEAF CLOVER DOWNLOAD
Looking for more St. Patrick’s Day activities? Check these out!
