St Patricks Day activities

 It's not St Patricks Day without leprechauns, and these little fellows were fun to make with help from my favourite book, Forest Fairy Crafts (see link on right).  The following are some learning experiences that I have created to help celebrate St Patricks Day this week.  I haven't really celebrated St Patricks Day in the past with children, but I have a couple of children who are part Irish, so I have been coming up with ideas to celebrate it.

This rainbow was easy to make using craft foam.  Craft foam is great to work with, a pack is just $2 at the $2 shop, and comes in rainbow colours, plus black and white - perfect for making a rainbow! Craft foam is pretty durable, doesn't rip or tear, and is easy to cut and draw on.  I created a stencil to figure out what size to make the shapes, and just cut out semicircles in the different colours that decreased in size.  It is an easy, self-correcting way for children to learn the order of colours of a rainbow, plus you can use the shapes to create circular patterns.

 Small World Play & Numeracy  

 This simply consists of a green fabric base, laminated black pots with numbers written on one side (I use these for Halloween as well), circles of yellow card for gold coins (I used my cuttlebug and a circle tag punch because that's what I have, but I would love to get a circular punch), green pom-poms, rainbows, and leprechauns.  I am wondering about adding green ribbons and other green bits and pieces, but the ribbon is likely to disappear into handbags very quickly.

Children can count out gold coins and put them in the pot, they can line the pots up in numerical order, and they can make up their own stories. 

 Felt Rainbow

This rainbow is simply cut from the different colours of felt and placed together to create a rainbow.  It is best to make a stencil to do this and give your rainbow some overlap.  As it is made of felt, it is great to use with a flannel board or that other stuff that schools often have on the wall that is easy to Velcro - felt sticks to it.  (I can't remember what it is called but it is great for felt!) If you have off-cuts, cut them up into rectangular boards to use for story-telling or for children to use with scraps of felt and felt shapes.

 Colour Mixing on the Lightbox

 I created this rainbow for the lightbox.  It uses red, yellow and blue transparent paper, with the aim of teaching children how the rainbow is made up of the primary colours, and their overlapping creates the secondary colours.

I had red and yellow transparent paper (Chromatico paper is great to use and is tear resistant) but I didn't have blue, so I used blue tissue paper and covered one side in clear contact paper to make it durable. Hence you don't see the green and the purple in the photo, but once you put it on the light table, you will be able to see it.

These things will be set up all week, but we will also have a Green Day on the 17th where everyone can come dressed in green. We will have green playdough with mint leaves available to put in it, green water in the water trough, green slime, blue and yellow paint...  The last time I put mint leaves in our drinking water, children exclaimed "What are all these leaves doing in the water!" so I am yet to decide whether to do that again. 
I have a heart punch, and 3 hearts put together makes a clover, so I will get the children punching hearts out of green paper and creating their own clovers.  Craft punches are great for developing children's strength in their fingers and hands.

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