St. Patrick’s Day Crafts for Kids

It’s just about time to get out all your green (and rainbow colored!) craft supplies and start making St. Patrick’s Day crafts. Here are a few ideas to get you started, whether you’re making with one kid or a classroom.

Make a Celtic knot with pipe cleaners with these instructions from Raise Curious Kids. It would be easy to make a whole garland to decorate the classroom if the kids get into it. They could be green, green and orange like shown here for the Irish flag, or in rainbow colors.

Speaking of garlands, you can make strips of paper into a chain of shamrocks with this tutorial from Blissful Domestication. This shows using a stapler, but if you’re making it with little kids you can use glue (stick or dots would probably be easiest) instead.

Or all the kids can make chains in rainbow colors to make this pot of gold craft from Crafty Morning. Leave it short like the one shown or make a bunch of chains to turn it into a door or wall decoration.

I love a good “stained glass” project made with tissue paper and clear, sticky paper, so why not make some shamrock suncatchers like these from Kids Activity Zone? Or use chalk pastels and dark paper to make these cool shamrocks from Projects with Kids. They’re so pretty!

One cool thing about shamrocks is that the leaves look like hearts, so if you can make a heart shape you can make a shamrock. These paper shamrocks from DIY Inspired use a heart-shaped paper punch, which makes it fast, but you could also use a cookie cutter or paper template to trace the heart shapes and cut them out by hand. Always looking for ways to build those fine motor skills! Also you could use a pipe cleaner for the stem instead of floral wire, or just glue the hearts to a piece of paper to make shamrocks or clover.

If you have kids with sewing skills, they can use felt cut into not-quite heart shapes to make a sweet little felt four leaf clover form Molly and Mama. Use them to decorate hair clips, make decorations and more.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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