Play School: St Patrick's Day

St Patrick's day is one of those holidays that I never really celebrated before i had kids. Well, unless you want to count all that indulging in green beer in my early 20's.  Now, though, every holiday is a great excuse to play and learn. :)

My boys are very into identifying colors these days. They are constantly telling me the color this or that item is. And they are good at it. They know: blue, green, purple, yellow, white, orange, black and brown. They also know red and pink but still have trouble saying those. Instead, red is rojo (Thanks Dora!) and pink is identified by making an oinking sound.  I'm always amazed at how their little minds work.

Here are the activities we did to celebrate St Paddy's day this year (sadly, no green beer).

Books:

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover by Lucille Colandro



The Night Before St Patrick's Day by Natasha Wing



Both were very cute books and the boys enjoyed them.

Activities:

Leprechaun Hats - Ah, these were a labor of love.  I used two sheets of poster board and some black and yellow construction paper (instead of felt as directed) to make these Leprechaun hats.  I knew the boys would get a kick out of them (and they did) so I'm glad I made them but man they were a pain in the you-know-what to put together. They came out cute though. :)

Building a Rainbow- for this one I had Mr Pears cut a dowel rod into six pieces of equal length.  I stuck them into a small floral foam wreath form that I had picked up at the dollar store.  (I left the plastic wrap on the wreath form because that foam can get messy!)  I gave the boys this strange looking "toy" along with their Melissa and Doug Lacing Beads. The boys had a great time placing the beads onto the dowels.

At first they just randomly stuck them on but then they began sorting by color and of course I showed them the order of the colors in the rainbow.  I'm sure we'll continue to play with this one for a while, it was a great new use for the lacing beads!

Magnetic Pom Pom Rainbow- I found this activity at Sew Fantastic.  The blog provides a free rainbow template that I printed and taped to our big magnet board in the playroom.  Then I hot glued pieces of magnets to poms. This is another great activity for color recognition and identification and one to one correspondence as well.

The boys were really excited to find that their poms now stuck to the magnet board!  They did a great job filling out the rainbow.

Shamrock Hunt - I hid ten foam shamrocks around the backyard for a bit of outside fun.  The boys love looking for things so they thought this was great.  After each one was found the boys (I) would count them to see how many we had.  Once we found all ten we had a treat!

Baking Cupcakes - I decided to forgo green food and make some delicious Coconut Lime cupcakes for St Paddy's instead.  I found the recipe here, and it is adapted from Ina Garten's famous coconut cupcakes so  of course they were awesome.  They only had some flecks of green from the lime zest but the kiddos didn't seem to mind.  Alex and Aaron continue to love to help in the kitchen. (And eat the results too of course!)

After all our fun activities and cupcakes we had a nice green bath courtesy of some food coloring and our foam shamrocks.  A fun day for my little (very partially) Irish boys.

** If you like my posts, please "like" me on Facebook!  You can click the link on the right hand side of the page to show me some love.  :)


This post is linked to:

This post was linked up on:
Hosted by Multiples-Mom, Multi-Testing Mommy, Shannon’s View From Here, Baby Giveaways Galore =============================================================== Check out our Pinterest Board where we will be listing all of your amazing ideas.