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

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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