Fun Games for St. Patrick’s Day Class Parties

If you do a class party for St. Patrick’s Day, or you’re just looking for some fun on-theme games to play with kids at home, this post has some great ideas.

Play Party Plan has a ton of ideas linked in this post, including minute to win it games, a scavenger hunt, would you rather cards and so much more. You could easily fill most of a day with these ideas. There’s also a word search, art ideas, dice rolling games and musical shamrocks to get your kiddos up and moving! Don’t miss the pin the gold on the rainbow game; so cute!

Another fun set of easy and low-prep St. Patrick’s Day games is described at Kids Activities. Several of these are active games, like relay races and hot potato with a real potato.

If you’re looking for activities that can also serve as decoration for the classroom, check out the printable build a leprechaun puppet from The Purple Pumpkin Blog. It’s shown in color but you could also print it in black and white and have kids color it in to make the activity last a little longer. (And find more St. Patrick’s day craft projects here.)

Tools to Grow OT has a great collection of printables with a St. Patrick’s Day theme, with an emphasis on fine motor skill practice. Some resources are free, and you can get access to more with a free or paid membership. I love the leprechaun beard/ponytail activities where you string yarn onto a picture and then braid it.

I have more St. Patrick’s Day printable activities here that you can use in a classroom or at home to bring some more shamrocks and leprechauns into your life!

[Photo: Play Party Plan.]

I don’t know why Pinterest just suddenly decided I needed to see all the content about task cards and task boxes for kids, but these ideas are great for the classroom to keep in centers or have on hand for early finishers. You can also use them at home as quiet bags or boxes for kids to use when younger siblings might be sleeping, or in the car for a non-screen activity.

Let’s take a look at some fine motor skill task cards and how you can use them to teach kids skills while they play.

Pre-K Pages has a nice set of playdough task cards you can use in boxes or bags with a little tray (or they can just work on the table if they are sitting at a table). Working with clay or play dough is a great fine motor skill exercise, or you can add these to your playdough center if you have one to give them a little bit of direction while they work.

Teaching Mama has a bunch of great ideas for fine motor task boxes, from practicing working a glue bottle to threading beads, using clothespins or scissors, dropping water, finger painting and more. There’s a free printable that shows all the task options she talks through in the post if you want to make your own little boxes, or just keep these ideas on hand when you’re ready to add some fine motor fun to your days.

One of the ideas she mentions in that post is working with a hole punch, and Early Learning Ideas has a whole bunch (the urge to write “hole bunch” is strong) of ideas for printables that help kids practice hole punching, whether it’s a strip with circles on it for them to punch or pictures that include circles for punching, these ideas make it a little more fun to practice this important skill.

My Happy Place Teaching has a whole post about using fine motor task boxes in kindergarten, and her paid resource includes more than 100 task ideas with printables. But if you don’t need 100 boxes you can still get some good ideas from this post about different tasks to include and why and when you can use them. She also mentions using them in the morning while you’re busy with kids coming in at different times, which is a great idea.

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