St. Patrick’s Day – Mrs Mama Bird

There are so many fun ways to incorporate rainbows into preschool play and learning. In this post, you will find rainbow themed activities to enhance color recognition, letter recognition, phonemic awareness, number recognition, counting, writing and sensory play.

Whenever I am planning a theme to design activities around, I always start with the children’s books about that topic. Rainbow books can be stories with rainbows in them, books about rainbows, and books about the colors of the rainbow. A few of my favorites are A Rainbow of My Own, How the Crayons Saved the Rainbow, Curious George Discovers the Rainbow, Ready to Read Rainbow, Planting a Rainbow, and Bear Sees Colors. Of course, there are so many to choose from and my collection continues to grow. In this post, you will find a FREE craftivity to compliment A Rainbow of My Own, by Don Freeman and a catchy song you can use on your own preschool color hunt.

First, I am going to share the Rainbow Alphabet and Number Cover up activities that I designed and the different ways that they can be used. There are 3 sets of cards that can be used in these activities: uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers 1 – 20.

There are four different versions of the cover up mats: uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers 1 – 10 and numbers 1 – 20. You will need to decide what you want your preschoolers to use to cover up the letters and numbers that they are matching. Dot markers, mini erasers, flat marbles (I would use blue to represent rain drops!), and circular chips work well.

If you have the alphabet or number mini erasers from Target, that eliminates the need to use the cards. My kids love these erasers. They fit perfectly on the mat, they stay in place and they are fun to manipulate.

To set up the activity, laminate and cut out the cards that you need. You can place them in a sensory bin for your preschoolers to find, identify and cover. A colorful base works perfectly for a rainbow activity. I used pony beads, but Perler beads or dyed rice would be fun too!

If you don’t have time to prep a sensory bin, you can simply use the cards to make a flip or draw pile. Have students pick from the top, cover that letter or number then discard it. They can keep going until they’ve covered every letter or number!

For those of you who prefer not to print in color, there are black and white versions of the cover up mats as well. These are perfect for single use. Students can find the alphabet or number cards, match it on their mats and dot it with dot markers.

When I was planning all of these rainbow activities, I tried to find a wooden puzzle that separated by each part of the rainbow. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find one anywhere. So I decided to make my own using high quality clipart and color labels. Once it was printed and laminated, I added a few piece of magnetic tape to the back of each piece so that the puzzle could be built on a magnet surface. I used a small cookie tin from the Dollar Tree, but a whiteboard or oil pan would work well also.

My daughter, Lillian, absolutely loved putting this together. It took her a couple tries before she got the order of the colors right, but she did it! This idea led me to make several more rainbow themed puzzles.

I created three strip puzzles that divide the rainbow into narrow strips with clues along the bottom to help put it back together in the right order. One strip puzzle spells out the word rainbow and the others put numbers 1 – 10 and 11 – 20 in numeric order.

The next set of rainbow puzzles I created are several sets of 2-piece puzzles. One set connects an uppercase letter to its corresponding lowercase letter. Another set connects both letters to a picture of something that starts with the corresponding letter sound.

The last set of 2-piece puzzles I created are connecting a number to it’s matching value on a die or dice. This set of rainbow puzzles include numbers 1 – 12. This is the set I decided to set up for Lillian to practice numbers with. She’s only three, so we started with only puzzles 1 – 6. That is what I love about these large sets of 2 piece puzzles. You can use only the ones that you would like to practice with your preschoolers and save the others for later.

For Lillian, I set up at rainbow themed sensory bin and placed each piece of the six puzzles in the bin. I also placed a cookie tin inside the bin to act as our vertical surface. We worked together to find all the puzzle pieces and connect the rainbows back together by matching the numbers to their quantities. This is also a great way to introduce and practice subitizing with your preschoolers.

When we were done with the number puzzles, the sensory bin itself was a really fun activity! To make this rainbow themed sensory bin, I dyed some rice blue and let it dry overnight. Then I added blue flat marbles (rain drops), cotton balls (clouds), sun and rainbow mini erasers, rainbow “eggs,” and some various scoops and small bowls. Lillian had a great time scooping the contents of this bin from one container to the next and sorting out all the loose parts she found inside.

On of my favorite preschool rainbow activities is going on a color hunt! Color hunts pair very well with the story Bear Sees Colors, by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman, but you can use them with any rainbow story or as their own stand alone activity. For this particular color hunt, we sang a very catchy song while we looked for all the colors of the rainbow. Here it is:

Can You Find The Color (to the tune of Have You Seen the Muffin Man?)

Can you find the color red, color red, color red?

Can you find the color red and put it in this basket?

Keep singing through all the colors until you have found every color of the rainbow! You can even extend this activity by building a big rainbow on the floor with all the colorful items.

The last rainbow activity I want to share with you today is an adorable craftivity that I made to compliment the story A Rainbow of My Own, by Don Freeman. This craftivity allows preschoolers to draw and write about what they would do if they had their very own rainbow, just like the boy imagines in the story.

There are two versions of the craftivity for you to choose from. One version has a sentence starter for your students to complete. It reads “If I had my own rainbow, I would…” The second version of the craftivity simply has blank lines. You can find this printable craftivity for FREE in my shop by clicking the icon below. You can also find the Rainbow Letter and Number Cover Up and Rainbow Puzzles below.

I hope you were able to find some rainbow inspiration today. Have fun planning fun rainbow activities with your preschoolers!

You may also be interested in these posts from the blog!

Are you celebrating St. Patrick’s Day? This post will highlight the St. Patrick’s Day themed math activities I’ve created for preschoolers to enhance visual discrimination, sorting and classifying, counting, number identification, patterning, number matching, one to one correspondence and skip counting. This includes a Shamrock Sort and Classify FREEBIE. The link is at the bottom!

In case you’re like me and love to include fun literary connections in everything you do, I’m going to mention this sweet picture book, Ten Lucky Leprechauns. The illustrations are fun and the concept is simple – counting to ten. It works perfectly as a read aloud with preschoolers, especially to reinforce counting around St. Patrick’s Day.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the same and different cards I’ve created for St. Patrick’s Day. There are a total of 12 cards, each displaying 4 shamrocks. Three are alike and one is different. Students can practice identifying the different shamrock by covering up with a manipulative of some sort. You can use gold coins, green glass gems, or any other festive counter that you can fine. I used foam shamrocks from the dollar store.

The Shamrock Sort & Classify activity also encourages preschoolers to think about what is the same and what is different about the shamrocks. This set includes 15 different shamrocks representing 5 different sizes and 3 different patterns. I also created sorting mats for preschoolers to need that visual. The sorting mats will help preschoolers sort by size into small, medium or large groups. They can also help preschoolers sort by pattern into checkers, polka dots, or stripes. This resource is FREE in my shop and you can find the link at the bottom of this post.

Preschoolers can practice counting by locating different St. Patrick’s Day pictures throughout the room and counting the St. Patrick’s Day icons on each. Emmett enjoyed finding the different cards throughout the room and filling up his Count the Room recording sheet. There are 8 icon cards in all, and each shows a quantity of 1 – 8.

The Rainbow Number Find includes number cards 1 – 20 with a pot of gold theme. You can set them up in a sensory bin or a draw pile. Then have preschoolers find a number and trace the corresponding number on the Rainbow Number Find mat. There are two versions of the mat, 1 – 10 and 1 – 20, each in color or black and white.

For preschoolers who are working on counting as well as one to one correspondence, grid games are so helpful and fun. Simply print the game board and gather a dice and some counters. I used plastic gold coins from the dollar store. Have your kiddos roll the dice, then add that many counters to the board, one on each square. Help them count as they go! There are two different versions of the game, one with 20 and one with 30 pots of gold.

Next is another dice game! The Shamrock Roll and Cover is a simple way to practice subitizing and number recognition. Have your preschoolers roll the dice and cover the number they land on. They can play with partners or independently.

Emmett and I played this one together and he really enjoyed it. We used the 7 – 12 mat and I was able to use a blank foam cube that I had in my stash of supplies. I just wrote numbers 7 – 12 on it with a sharpie. You can also use 2 dice, but make sure one stays on the number six and the other one gets rolled.

Another activity you can use these adorable number cards for is the St. Patrick’s Day Tens Frame Mats. Make the cards available, either in a sensory bin or draw pile, and have your preschoolers practice representing each number with counters in a tens frame. I used my plastic gold coins again for this one, but any counters will work. There is a mat for up to 10 and a mat for up to 20.

The St. Patrick’s Day pattern mats can be used as a full page or cut into pattern strips. The patterns include AB, ABC, ABB, and AAB. Preschoolers can use the little picture cards to complete the different patterns. If you have Velcro Dots, you could use those to help the pictures stay in place.

Emmett was so excited to show me what he knew about patterns. There’s also a blank pattern sheet included for those preschoolers that are ready to make their own patterns. Emmett got right to work on the blank sheet as soon as he finished the fill-in-the-blanks sheets.

The final St. Patrick’s Day preschool math activity I’d like to show you is all the puzzles I created. The first set includes 20 sets of two piece puzzles. One piece has a number and the other piece has a quantity, all St. Patrick’s Day themed. Preschoolers can take turns matching these or connect them independently if they are ready.

The second set of puzzles include numbers and pictures. Once you cut these puzzles into strips, students can use the pattern (counting or skip counting) to help them put the St. Patrick’s Day pictures back together. The puzzles are tiered so that you can differentiate for your students. They include counting 1 – 3, 1 – 4, 1 – 5, 6 – 10, 11 – 20 and skip counting by 2s and 10s.

Emmett is 5 and is getting ready to start kindergarten in the fall, so he chose to practice counting from 11 – 20 and by 10s. I did have to tell him what number each puzzle started with so that he could get started. But after that, he was good to go!

I hope you were able to find some inspiration for your little learners! If you are interested in downloading these paid and free resources from my shop, click the icons below. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!