St. Patrick’s Day Activities Your Kids are Sure to Love

March 7, 2017 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

There are so many holiday-themed activities out there for kids that it can get a little overwhelming. Sometimes when I collect links I come back with tons of them, and I’m not sure that’s super helpful. I’d love to know if you prefer large or small activity roundups, if you’d like more STEM or more educational activities and for what age levels. You are why I’m here!

In the meantime, here’s a little collection of fun activities you might want to do at home or with a small group of kids for St. Patrick’s Day. Enjoy!

Building a leprechaun trap is a fun crafty activity that is easy to turn into a STEM activity by presenting kids with a collection of items with which to make a trap. You can do it with LEGOs, recycled materials, an old shoebox, really whatever you have on hand. Homeschool Preschool has a huge collection of ideas to get your brain going. She has printables, book lists and other great St. Patrick’s Day stuff, too.

Instead of a trap, you might want to build a graham cracker leprechaun house instead. It’s just like a gingerbread house, just with green icing. Adventures of Mel has a tutorial with all the details.

Another fun STEM idea comes from Joy in the Works, who made a homemade catapault game where Lucky Charms are launched into little pots. This one looks like a lot of fun!

And what’s St. Patrick’s Day without some rainbows? The Pinterested Parent has some great ideas for making your own rainbows and then painting them (sort of like you might draw a shadow). So clever!

If you have older kids, you’ll want to try this technique for making perfect rainbow tie-dye from Crafty Chica. It looks amazing and so much fun.

Do you do any special activities for St. Patrick’s Day? I’d love to hear about them!

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Gross Motor Math Ideas

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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