Learning Activities Using Shamrocks

A while back I shared a roundup of shamrock themed math activities, and I thought it was time to share some more fun learning activities that you can do with shamrocks because they’re such a fun shape.

Make a simple lacing card with this template from Carrots are Orange to give kids a little practice with their fine motor skills. (You can find more shamrock templates for this or other crafts at The Artisan Life, or search online for more.)

If you happen to have some green craft foam or felt you can make this easy shape puzzle game from Little Family Fun. You could even make it a sort of scavenger hunt, hiding the pieces around the room and then have kids match them up. Make this a language arts activity by writing an upper case letter on one half and the corresponding lower case letter on the other. Or you can pair up sight words, prefixes and suffixes, or numerals with the word for the number, to name a few.

Speaking of number matching, there’s a printable from Team Cartwright that takes it a step further, with shamrocks you can cut apart and each petal shows the number presented in a different way so kids have to find them, match them up and put them back together. (There’s also a color by number printable here.)

Play with patterns and simple shapes with these building block shamrocks from JDaniel4’s Mom. You can use small building blocks and construction paper to reinforce that these things are the same shapes, or just use one or the other, whatever you have on hand that’s easy for you.

Do a little shamrock counting and coloring with these super cute printables from Crystal & Comp. Kids can color the rainbow and color and count the shamrocks, then write the numbers and the word for the number with the help of a tracing section at the bottom (or cut that part off and have older kids write the words and numerals on their own).

And get kids moving by hiding shamrocks all over the room/house and playing the shamrock math race game from Coffee Cups and Crayons. Super easy to set up and kids can play it endlessly!

St Patrick’s Day Activity books on Amazon

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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