Leprechaun Learning Activities

Leprechauns are a fun part of St. Patrick’s Day, and building leprechaun traps is a fun St. Patrick’s Day STEM activity. Let’s look at some other ways to bring these little green guys into the classroom for some learning fun.

Sing Play Create has some fun facts about leprechauns, coloring pages, games and writing activities aimed at kids kindergarten through third grade.

Make leprechaun stew (a counting activity) with this cute idea from Jenna Pellerin. Or count along with the book Ten Lucky Leprechauns with these math activities from One Sharp Bunch.

Build a leprechaun with this printable that provides lots of good cutting and gluing practice from PJs and Paint. Or make a cute craft stick leprechaun puppet with this tutorial from Crayons and Cravings. This one is made with craft foam but your could probably also do it with cardstock if you don’t have foam handy in the right colors.

Use pictures of kids to make silly leprechaun decorations with this idea from Simple Everyday Mom. This would be a fun one to do to decorate the classroom or use as a bulletin board decoration.

You can also roll and color a leprechaun with this printable activity from Your Therapy Source.

In addition to making leprechaun traps, which I mentioned above, there are lots of fun STEM and STEAM ideas you can make with a St. Patrick’s Day twist. Not all of the St. Patrick’s Day challenges at Carly and Adam have leprechauns involved, but you’ll find a leprechaun collecting gold in a dice rolling game and a leprechaun glyph drawing project. You can find their printables on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Another post with tons of good classroom ideas for St. Patrick’s Day, with a few leprechauns thrown in, is this one from Sweet Firstie Fun. Their resources are at Teachers Pay Teachers, too. I love the shape leprechaun shown here.

Candy Leprechaun Hats [Edible Crafts]

10 Leprechaun traps that re-use all sorts of things [Recycled Crafts]

Fun Games for St. Patrick’s Day Class Parties

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.

Have you read?

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