St. Patrick's Day Ideas

This week in preschool we were going to be talking about St. Patrick's Day so I have put together some activities you might be able to do at home.  Each week we are out I will share a post with activities and projects and games you can try at home to break up all the time you will be spending indoors.  I hope you are able to get outside sometimes too and will try to include a few things for those occasions as well.

While we hope this time at home doesn't last too long, rest assured we are prepared to help you e-learn with your preschooler!  None of this stuff is mandatory but as one mom to many other parents/caregivers sometimes we need a little help coming up with new things to do with our kiddos.  Enjoy!

If you have a zip-loc bag, sharpie and either some paint or food coloring and shaving cream you can do this first activity: Mixing colors to create shamrocks.  Simply draw your best shamrock on a zip-loc bag with a sharpie then squirt a bit of yellow and a bit of blue paint into the bag.  Seal it up so there is no air (don't want it to pop) then give the bag to your child to rub and move the paint until it mixes to create green and then to make it more challenging, have them move that paint only into the shamrock!  If you don't have paint at home you can use shaving cream and yellow and blue food coloring to do that same thing.  Once you do this activity, if you have other colors at home, try mixing them in bags too!  This activity is great for those of you are not fans of a 'mess' in your home.

Another way to work on science and math is to draw a variety of circles on wax paper.  Make some of them large, some small and some medium all over the paper then using either an eye dropper or a straw cut in half (so it's easier to handle in preschool hands) have the child drop water into each circle and count how many drops it took to fill each one.  To alter it to St. Patrick's day, just make the water yellow and have it be Leprechaun coins!  See this site for details.

Our kiddos have always LOVED making Magic Milk.  This works with just water as a liquid base too however the white of the milk makes the rainbow really pop!

Another game/project the children love to do is all about finding things a leprechaun loves; items that are either green or yellow!  If you have small items, have your child go through them and if they can be glued down, make process art out of them.  If you really are prepared for the challenge, have your child search your home for green and/or yellow items and see how big a pile they can make of these items.  Pair this with the Leprechaun Trap and you are set for at least an hour!

Using a CD or DVD laying around and a flashlight from your phone or an actual flashlight you just need a white wall or sheet to make the magic of rainbows!  See this site for more details!

Using anything from around the home, old shoe boxes, stickers, toys, toilet paper tubes, foil, etc. you can build your very own leprechaun trap!  This is STEM learning at it's finest and always has been a classroom favorite!  See this website for more crazy fun ways to build traps for more ideas on this.

Still not enough stuff to do?  Check out this site for St. Pat's Day stuff or my Pinterest page for all sorts of resources.

I will post once a week after spring break should we still be out of school.  Hopefully this will help with ideas of things you can do at home and if you are eager to find more in the meantime, look through past blog posts-much of what we do in preschool can be altered to do at home!  Here is an older post with technology ideas.  While we hope they will be helpful, technology is not meant to be the only thing children should be using during the day.