TOT SCHOOL: ST. PATRICK'S DAY

We spent two weeks doing St. Patrick's Day activities.... shamrocks, rainbows, pots of gold, leprechauns, green, etc. It was a lot of fun!

SCHOOL ACTIVITIES

"Get to the Gold" maze - Punkin had to follow the letters in ABC order to get the leprechaun to his pot of gold. She is getting really good at these activities. I got this from "Musings of Me" but for some reason I cannot get access to the blog anymore, so I am wondering if it no longer exists? Anyone know?

I wrote sight words Punkin knows in shamrocks to make sentences for her to read. She put a shamrock sticker at the end of each sentence after she read it correctly.

I made THIS game to help Punkin with visual discrimination. She actually did GREAT! She had to look at a small picture of a shamrock (made up of 3 hearts) and recreate the exact shamrock with her big hearts on her template page.

The idea here was for Punkin to just look at the sticker cards and to match them to the correct cups without having to count the stickers. She could do 2 for sure and sometimes 3.

I was trying to get Punkin to work on isolated number order. In other words, I wrote numbers 0 - 9 on shamrocks but then only set out 3 or 4 in order on the floor, with one number missing somewhere in the middle. She had to look at her shamrock number line and try to determine which number was missing. Even though she can put numbers in order, this isolated number excercise proved to be a tad bit challenging.

She started to get the hang of it, though, towards the end, and did better the second day we did it.

I got this Lucky Gingers Roll and Cover activity from Mrs. Lirette's Learning Dectectives. I had Punkin roll 3 dice and then count the dots on all three dice. Then, she had to cover up the total on her sheet using "gold coins." I liked this activity because it got her used to dot dice (instead of dice with numerals on them), and she got more practice identifying double digit numbers.

For this Gold Jumble (from Musings of Me), I said a word, and Punkin had to use her gold coins to cover up the beginning letter of the word that I said.

Race to the Gold - Basically, we took turns rolling the dice and moving our green marker that many spaces. If we landed on a shamrock, we had to move backwards two spaces.

I had these laminated blank gold coins from an old bulletin board display when I was teaching. So, I printed out some pots of gold and used a dry erase marker to write simple word families on the coins. Then, I had Punkin sort the words by word family.

One afternoon, I hid some play gold coins around the house that had colored dot stickers on them. I had Punkin go on a "treasure hunt" to find all the coins.

Then, once she found them all, she had to match them to the correct color word on the pot of gold.

We are currently working on reading color words, so this was good reinforcement.

On another day, I wrote color words on shamrocks and hid them in her school room. As she found them, she read the word and we said our color word chant for each one.

And on yet another day, I put the color word shamrocks in a circle on our living room floor and we played "Musical Shamrocks." While the music played, she ran around the circle. When the music stopped, she had to stop and read me the color word on the shamrock closest to her.

Color Word graphing. I used colored dot stickers on a large dice. Punkin rolled the dice, then found the color word on the graph and added a shamrock sticker.

Of course, we had to also do some Lucky Charm marshmallow graphing!

CRAFTS AND HANDS ON FUN

We always enjoy making "stained glass" tissue paper projects for each season.

Handprint pot of gold. (Idea came from B.Inspired, Mama!) The gold coins are wrappers from our chocolate gold coins that we used to count down the days until St. Patrick's Day. (More on that below.)

Green Fizzy Fun! I gave her a pan of baking soda and a bowl of green vinegar. She used a medicine dropper to make all kinds of fun fizzy "lakes."

Okay, the girl played with this for over 30 minutes. Simple. Just green water, ice cube trays, and a medicine dropper.

And again, this was a huge hit as well. She sat at the table and played with this for a LONG time! I hid play gold coins in some green split peas and had her hunt for them. When she found them, she put them in her "bank." (A formula container with a slit cut in the lid.)

When she got tired of that, she used her play spatula to scoop the peas and coins back and forth.

FUN WITH FOOD

Muffin Tin Monday - In honor of St. Patrick's Day, our Muffin Tin Meal included everything green: Green peppers, green spaghetti, green peas, green honeydew melon, a green apple, and green celery. She also had green milk to drink that day.

Shamrock and Leprechaun Hat pancakes

Shamrock Waffle - I added green food coloring to the batter, and once the waffle was done, I cut each section into a heart, then laid everything on the plate to look like a shamrock.

We painted toast with milk. This was my attempt at painting a shamrock on it.

My silly attempt at a Leprechaun sandwich..... the one over at Meet the Dubiens was much better! :)

Punkin LOVED her rainbow spaghetti. I dyed portions of spaghetti with food coloring and then laid them on her plate in the shape of a rainbow. I used garlic bread with cheese on top as the pot of gold and blue jello as a cloud. I got this idea from Growing a Jeweled Rose.

Our healthy "Shamrock Shake" that I got from a Family Fun magazine. It included honeydew, kiwi, vanilla yogurt, and parsley. I wasn't a big fan of it myself, but Punkin enjoyed it well enough.

One day for a snack we had green milk, marshmallows dipped in green chocolate, and mini oreos dipped in green chocolate.

Punkin helped me make green Jello Popcorn Balls to give to our friends. I got the recipe from HERE. You can do this for any season with any color/flavor of jello.

And we had a countdown to St. Patrick's Day on our refrigerator using chocolate coins. Each day, Punkin would get to take off the next chocolate coin for her snack as we counted down.

TINY TOT SCHOOL

I have started doing some basic "tot trayish" type activities with Firecracker right after Punkin goes down for her afternoon nap. Nothing major. Just a time set aside for me to play one on one with Firecraker for awhile.

With these blocks, I'd mention the colors as she'd pick them up. I also would say things like, "Good job! You put the green block inside the basket!" or "Look! The yellow basket is ON your head!" :)

Again, these rings were good for mentioning colors as she played as well as "on" and "off."

She loves this ball popper toy, and one afternoon we spent a good 20 minutes playing with it. She loved grabbing the balls as they popped out and also putting them back in the hole. Good for fine motor skills.

With these animal puzzle pieces, I mentioned colors, animal names, and animal sounds as she played with them.

Can you guess what the focus was on here? Yep. Colors, numbers, shapes. Now, of course, I know she is not going to suddenly know her colors or numbers. But I believe that the exposure to these words and concepts even early on is very beneficial.

Firecracker just recently started realizing that tapping two things together can make neat sounds. So, I got out my metal measuring cups one day and let her explore!

Baby spoons and forks inside a plastic jar. I also just gave her lots of different containers that day to explore.

We had a great time the last two weeks. We'll take a week break from any official "theme" and then start up the week after with Easter/Spring! I've linked up to 1+1+1=1 Tot School and PreSchool Corner. Have a great week! :)