St. Patrick’s Day STEM Activities

Teachers are always looking for ways to infuse a little more fun into learning, and St. Patrick’s Day gives us a great opportunity to do that, with clover, leprechauns, and everything green. And there are so many fun STEM learning activities that can be done around St. Patrick’s Day, from some of your classic STEM projects with a St. Patrick’s Day twist to building leprechaun traps.

Those posts will give you plenty of ideas for St. Patrick’s Day themed projects you can do in the classroom or at home, but I wanted to add a few more for the season.

Carly & Adam have a few low-prep STEM challenges you can try, including building a bridge out of coins, a leprechaun tower and a rainbow bridge.

Science Demo Guy has a set of printable task cards for STEM challenges available at Teachers Pay Teachers, which were meant for distance learning because they’re activities you can do with minimal materials. For all six activities all you need are construction paper, paper cups, straws, craft sticks and yarn, as well as scissors, tape and glue. Check out the blog post to see all the activities and how to set some of them up.

Do some St. Patrick’s Day coding without a computer to draw the images on these free printables from Mama Teaches. The codes make a rainbow, leprechaun hat and shamrock design, and you can get them on her freebies page when you sign up to receive emails.

Teach Student Savvy also has a collection of STEM challenges with a St. Patrick’s Day twist, but the one that caught my eye was this fun and colorful rainbow run, which is easy to make with cardboard and construction paper. You can get inspired by the blog post and if you want the full lessons with printables on simple machines, instructions for kids to follow, places to record observations and more, you can get the whole activity pack at Teachers Pay Teachers.

St Patrick’s Day Activity books on Amazon

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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