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

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply