Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Here are a few things I did with my class for St. Patrick's Day this year. 

I came across this on Pinterest - Lucky Charms Treats! A perfect snack for St. Patrick's Day! Very easy, very messy, and very yummy!!!

 I created and printed these little labels and used green ribbon. I also made some for my teacher friends that said: I am Lucky to work with you!

Every year I also let my kids graph Lucky Charms marshmallows. I have a graph that I use, but this one from TPT is much cuter! :)

A friend shared this idea from Pinterest and I thought I'd give it a try!

Shrinking Leprechaun Hats

On Thursday, I had my kids use permanent markers to decorate their cups (hats). I told them that we were going to see if we could get a leprechaun or two to come to our classroom, so the hats should have things that leprechauns like. The kids drew the Irish flag, pots of gold, rainbows, and shamrocks. The came out really well!

I told the kids I would put them out at their seats once they had had time to "dry" that afternoon.

I took them home and followed the directions on the link above. 

Preheated my oven to 250, put 4 cups on a cookie sheet at a time and watched for (a long) 3 or 4 minutes until the cups began to shrink. When this part happened, it happened fast! Mrs. Miner says to watch them and she isn't kidding! If you aren't careful, they will shrink too much! I had a few that tilted and few that fell over and kind of melted closed...oops. But, many of them came out great!

We had a read a book earlier in the week called The Hungry Leprechaun by Mary Calhoun about a leprechaun who gets caught by a greedy man who only wants him to make things into gold. However, the little leprechaun has trouble with his magic.

I wrote a little message on the board that said that the leprechaun friends had come and loved the hats so much that they wanted to wear them too! So, they tried to shrink them, but some of the friends were not that good at magic, yet...

The kids were able to infer what happened in the room based on the clues left for them - leprechauns are little so they shrank the hats, they are short so they needed the chair to reach to markers. They dumped the markers out so they could find the green. They wrote the message down low because that was how high they could reach. 

It was really a fun day!

Happy St. Patrick's Day to you and your kiddos! :)