These are the activities that I set up for my toddlers aged 3 and 1 in the week leading up to St. Patrick’s Day. This is a collection of ideas that you can use at home or in the classroom.
- Rainbow colour matching
To develop their fine motor skills, I drew a large rainbow on paper and then encouraged the children to colour match the coloured stickers to the arches on the rainbow. The gold at the bottom is the Leprechaun’s gold according to the toddler.
2. Make rainbow toast
The toddlers loved getting involved and helping to make rainbow toast for breakfast. It’s really easy to make.
Mix food colouring with milk and paint it onto the bread. Toast the bread and you have rainbow toast. The toddlers loved this for breakfast. Although it was dry so we added butter once the bread was toasted.
3. Play ‘Where’s Larry?’
This book is the Irish version of ‘Where’s Wally?’ Larry is a leprechaun who is hiding around various locations in Ireland e.g. Croagh Patrick, The Giant’s Causeway. Toddler 3 loves looking for Larry and is still looking through the book in August. After reading the book, we hid our toy leprechaun and the toddlers loved looking for him in the living room.
4. Green water play
In the water tray, I added green water with coins and St. Patrick’s day confetti with horse shoes, shamrocks and hats. The toddlers enjoyed scooping up the confetti with the nets and putting them in cups. We did lots of counting of our treasure and comparing who had more and who had less.
5. St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin / tuff spot
The toddlers loved playing with the sensory bin . It was filled with green shredded paper which were hiding toy gold coins and chopped up gold beads from the Christmas decorations.
Toddler 3 loved hunting for the leprechaun’s gold and together we arranged the gold chains into order of size from longest to shortest.
Please note that children should always be supervised when playing with water or small objects.
As the children played , I dropped Irish words into the play e.g. ‘glas’ for ‘green’ (pronounced ‘gloss’). Teaching children a second language should not be hard especially if you are learning with them. Just keep introducing the words and then you can build up to phrases.