We started the week of St. Patrick's Day making rainbows to attract the leprechaun to our classroom. This week was full of rainbows and shamrocks so this blog will be filled with pictures of us working on these things and more!
We played games where we tossed 'gold in the leprechaun's bucket' and sorted colors a lot this week into the parts of the rainbow.
We heard stories about how the real St. Patrick's Day began and stories about leprechauns too.
During some of those stories we heard there might be a leprechaun on the loose so we went on a hunt around the school to find one in the morning and afternoon and while we were out a leprechaun destroyed our classroom! The preschoolers were amazing while they helped clean the room back up.
We played colors of the rainbow match with the preschoolers this week to work our upper arm muscles then sang and danced to Irish music.
In the afternoon we looked for letters on shamrocks to work on identifying capitol verses lower case. Then we tried to draw them in green shaving cream on the tables.
We discovered another rainbow in the sensory table this week with rainbow Orbees and glass stone rocks where the children were able to feel them all and sort them by texture.
We made door decorations with a little St. Patty's Day luck and lots of gold and shamrocks. These can be hung on little bedroom doorknobs to bring good luck to the little dreamers inside.
This week we also searched for a lot coins. The leprechaun hid a lot of coins this week in shaving cream, goop, bubbling cubes and more. The children loved getting messy with their friends as they searched and dug out coins all week.
We used food often this week to make rainbows, sometimes 3D and other times we used things for sorting and gluing to make treasures and rainbows.
Working on our letter writing and basic phonics this week we worked on some St. Patrick's Day words before getting our muscles moving with some rainbow hopscotch time! We try to move from table activities to circle time or other moving activities to mix things up. Remember that a person's attention span is their age and therefore we plan a lot of things in one day as most of our students can't sit doing one activity for more than 3 or 4 minutes. 
We did a lot of math this week counting coins either to take home, add to the leprechaun's pot of gold he left behind or to put in paper pots. We also counted and sorted shamrocks too. We ended up finding over 200 coins in the preschool by the end of the week and the preschoolers helped us sort them into piles of 10 then count by tens to see more than 200!
After counting paper coins in pots we read a St. Patty's Day book before heading on a field trip in the afternoon to the gym where we races on scooters and really had a chance to get sweaty!
We made wearable crafts this week as well by making a few different hats and necklaces out of a variety of items. We even made a little Shamrock man too!
To end the week we played more shamrock games and the Leprechaun Says and even were given little hats to wear while we played spelling games on iPads. We made rainbows out of milk and water color paint and then created our final projects of the week. We leave you with lots of holiday photos this week! 
What's Coming Up?
Pirate Pete Preschool is officially full for the Fall 2017 School Year. If you are still interested in our program we will be starting our waiting list and will let you know if we have any openings. Thanks for your support!
This coming week we will be talking about our health as we look at fitness, nutrition, and hygiene.
March 25th - April 2nd will be Spring Break at Palatine High School and we won't have preschool during that time.
