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.

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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