Activities to bring in St. Patrick’s Day for both kindergarten and first grade can be fun and simple. Here are 6 St. Patrick’s Day lesson plan ideas or activities that will work great like creating a rainbow writing piece, a shamrock art piece or making calming Leprechaun jelly. Classroom activities for St. Patrick’s Day can be fun and still keep you on track with your instructional objectives.
St. Patrick’s Day Writing
Let’s focus on writing activities first. There are lots of ways to bring creative writing into St. Patrick’s day or you can give a prompt like this Pot of Gold craftivity freebie. Change up the writing portion to meet your goals and incorporate letter writing or change it into an opinion piece to work on Common Core standards.
You could also make students write supporting facts to explain why someone in their life is worth more than gold. This is a great hallway display and you can staple additional pages onto the front if your students need more room to write. {Free download}
Worth More than Gold – Wouldn’t this also be a great gift for Mother’s Day (or Father’s Day) if you saved them until later in the school year? {Free download}
St. Patrick’s Day Reading
Leprechaun Mini-Book – Moving onto reading, this little free download is a pattern story that features farm animals. The leprechaun asks questions of each animal as he goes in search of his pot of gold. If you have beginning readers, then this would make for a great take-home book. {Free download}
St. Patrick’s Day Activities
Scented Shamrocks – Students can use scented shamrocks to add embellishment to any writing piece or as an activity to work on using the five senses into their writing. Another idea is to glue this onto the middle of an 11×17 piece of construction paper with a lighter background color and to write the facts they learned about St. Patrick’s Day around the shape, outlining the shamrock with text. It will be a beautiful effect and make passer-byers catch a second glimpse {or whiff}.
Faux Tie Dye Shamrocks – Take any of the ideas above for using a shamrock and integrating into writing. These would also be beautiful in a window with the light shining through. This activity will also work great for symmetry, just like you’d discover with cutting a snowflake!
Leprechaun Jelly – So this recipe wasn’t originally created for St. Patrick’s Day, but it caught my eye. I love finding new purposes for things and to me this is leprechaun jelly! Creating this sparkly goo would be great for students to each have their own little calming tupperware for during a lock down drill… don’t you think?
Want to turn it into a standards-based activity? Put it into baggies (without getting rid of some of the excess liquid like the recipe mentions) and have students use it as a tactile place to do their word work or spelling words. No need to erase – just smoosh and start again! These ideas inspire me to bring more green and fun into my teaching for the month of March and still feel like I can accomplish my objectives.
Do you have a favorite lesson plan for St. Patrick’s Day? Share with us on Teach Junkie by joining the community and submitting your idea.
More St. Patrick’s Day
- 4 Teacher Bling Ideas for St. Patrick’s Day
- St. Patrick’s Day Classroom Snacks
- 2 Fun Activities for St. Patrick’s Day Math
Teach Junkie
Leslie {aka the original Teach Junkie} loves learning new things to make teaching easier and more effective. She enjoys featuring creative classroom fun when she's not designing teacher shirts, making kindergarten lesson plans or planning her family's next trip to Disney World.