Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
First, I would like to start off by stating this is not how most of the days go in our house. We watch our fair share of movies, build legos all day long, play the same board games repeatedly, and use the ipads.
St. Patrick’s Day brought a big day of fun activities though. A couple days leading up to the big day, N got giddy and asked me if I thought the leprechaun would come back this year to turn our milk green. I told him that I did not know, we would have to see. In that moment, I knew I had to make something happen. These boys are only going to be little and believing in leprechauns for so long.
The leprechaun was busy while the boys slept…
He turned our milk green (thanks to some food coloring). My tip for this is to save just a little bit at the end of your gallon to color. We opened a new gallon the day before (leaving the last bit in this gallon) so we did not have to turn an entire gallon green.
He found the leftover streamers from a birthday party and did some silly decorating (John Deere party coming in handy years later). N was very excited to bust through that obstacle first thing in the morning! The leprechaun used some shamrocks to lead the way to the boys’ special breakfast.
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Right away, the boys noticed that the leprechaun had left them some ‘gold’ to find. He had hid coins all over the place!
I used regular labels to write out the alphabet. I cut those up into squares to place on the coins. I should have used two different colors for the alphabet or paid attention to which coins I put each letter on, because they ended up with not the same amount of each. Whoops.
The boys were giggling as they went searching. Their faces lit up so much each time they found one of those leprechaun’s silly hiding spots! He hid a lot in the window seals, on the tables and chairs, by their toys in the living room, on the kitchen counter, and on the train table.
As the boys found their coins, they matched the uppercase and lowercase letters to fill their shamrocks. N rocked this! For C, I named the letters for him and had him repeat it (you have to start somewhere). Once their shamrocks were filled up, we took the labels off and counted their money. Hello, Math! We counted how many of each coin they had. We practiced counting by 5s and 10s. Then, they put their ‘gold’ in their piggy banks to save for another day.
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Our next activity was math related, too. We played a roll ‘n’ record game. Each boy started with a shamrock that had a bunch of empty circles. They took turns rolling a die. Tip: To help them learn to keep the die from going all over the place, I had them roll it on top of a small green shamrock the best that they could. Whatever number they rolled, they used a do-a-dot painter to fill in that many circles on their shamrock. N filled up his shamrock first. C was not far behind him.
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After that, it was time for a craft. We made our pots of gold. I painted each boy’s hand for a hand print. This was the base for our ‘gold’. They LOVED sprinkling on the gold glitter. Then, they glued on their black pots. Finally, we wrote out, “If I had a pot of gold, I would use it to buy a…” BOTH boys added “CSX train” at the end of their sentence. N (5) wrote his own; I wrote out C’s (3) for him.
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Our last activity for the morning was to bake our rainbow cake!!! Here we are ready to start baking. Yeah, it was St. Patrick’s Day. Yes, we were celebrating all day with fun activities. No, we were not wearing green. Duke had a basketball game that evening so blue it was for us.
The boys love to help me bake! I love baking with them, too. N loves cracking the eggs. C loves licking the bowl. We made our cake batter. Then, we divided the batter equally into six bowls. We used food coloring to make the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Hello, Science. While N mixed all six of the colors, C licked the original big bowl absolutely clean. We layered our cake like a rainbow starting with red on the bottom. Our orange and yellow seemed to mix together while baking and is hard to differentiate. Otherwise, it turned out pretty good.
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While our cake baked, we read some St. Patrick’s Day books (from my former life as a 1st grade teacher).
In the afternoon, we made our keepsake paintings. My favorite decorations in our house are always the hand print and foot print paintings made by the boys! One day they will be embarrassed that I hang these up and I do not care one bit! N made a four leave clover and C made a rainbow.
Our final rainbow activities for the day were a couple science experiments. We mixed colors to make new colors. We made different colored snow using hot and cold water. We learned that the hot water tubes make snow faster because the molecules are more active. Very cool stuff! The science experiments come from a Beginners Science Lab that N received for Christmas.
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Of course, our dessert after dinner was a piece of our rainbow cake!
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The day after St. Patrick’s Day we did nothing creative! The boys played with their toys, I ran my race, we attended a birthday party, and we ended the day chilling while watching some basketball. Until the next big day, whatever that may be…
