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

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

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