St. Patrick’s Day – Mrs Mama Bird

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March is finally here!! There is always something so refreshing about the start of March. Warmer weather is just around the corner and it’s time to start thinking about all the spring things, including St. Patrick’s Day! For those of you who don’t know, I am a Teaching Totes Specialist. I love putting together play-based learning kits for preschoolers that are available to rent in my area. But for those of you who are not local to me, I love sharing the elements of my Teaching Totes so that you can recreate your favorites for the little learners in your life!

Read on to find all the fun that I packed into the St. Patrick’s Day Teaching Tote, including some free printables!!

Of course when I am starting to gather ideas for learning activities pertaining to a certain theme, I always start with the books. Children’s literature is the perfect way to present a new theme, spark interest, fuel curiosity and demonstrate concepts. I’ve gathered a few for St. Patrick’s Day, here are my top five picks for preschoolers. I’ve also made it easy to add these stories to your own library, just click the picture!

How to Catch a Leprechaun is a playful story about a leprechaun who manages to evade all of the children’s clever traps. The illustrations are busy and engaging and the story is presented in a fun rhythm and rhyme. This is the perfect story to introduce a Leprechaun Trap STEM Challenge and motivate children to build their own leprechaun traps.

There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover! is another addition to the Old Lady series that is perfect for March. My kids LOVE this Old Lady because of the absolutely ridiculous things she decides to swallow. If you have a preschooler who loves silly stories, you will have to include this one in your March reading. It follows the beat of the original story so you can read it like a song or like a story.

Lucky Tucker is a sweet story about a puppy who recognizes all the good luck in his little puppy day. This one is perfect for your animal lovers and is a subtle way to teach children to look for the good in everyday, especially St. Patrick’s Day!

The Littlest Leprechaun is a relatable story about a Leprechaun who wanted a big important job. But every job he tried seemed too hard for a leprechaun his size. Just when he is starting to feel really discouraged, the Leprechaun finds a way that only he can help. If you have a little one who has ever felt discouraged by their size, this is a perfect story to add your March reading.

Pete the Cat and The Great Leprechaun Chase is the favorite in our house! At school, Pete learns that catching a leprechaun will bring you good luck. He sets up a Leprechaun catching service for his friends to help them get good luck. After several attempts, Pete finally catches a leprechaun named Clover! But he learns that he doesn’t need a leprechaun to have good luck, he is already one lucky cat! I love the lesson in this story, the luck you make is better than luck you take. It’s a fun way to teach children to recognize all the ways they are already lucky!

One thing that I always include in a new theme is a sensory bin to go with it! Here is a look at the St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin that I came up with. I always try to use budget friendly materials that are easy to find or recreate. The base for this one is dry chick peas covered with gold paint. Using chick peas as a base is one of my favorite options because they are easy to grasp and are so fun to dig through. The gold just adds a festive shine that is eye-catching and fun. Every sensory bin needs some sort of container to collect and pour out all the little pieces. These green bowls are perfect for the job! I found them in the party section at Dollar Tree, but you can use whatever you have. The foam glitter shamrocks are also from the Dollar Tree and are a great filler. You can count them, sort them by size, stack them or use them to mix up in the bowls. The other festive pieces in this sensory bin are from the Target Dollar Spot. Unfortunately, these seasonal items turn over so quickly and rarely reappear. So if you are not one of the lucky ones that grabbed these, don’t worry! Think green, gold and rainbows and you can add what you find. Another fun option is to dig out those mini witch’s cauldrons from Halloween and reuse them as pots of gold with gold coins or pennies.

(Disclaimer: Always use sensory bins under adult supervision. Because they contain small parts, they are not intended for children under 3 years old. You know your preschoolers best!)

Here’s a fun and festive way to practice colors! Grab color dot stickers and an even number of themed rubber ducks. You can use as many colors as you want. Place one dot sticker on the bottom of each duck so that you create color pairs. Then place the ducks on the table top upright so that you cannot see what color sticker they have on the bottom. Have your preschoolers play a concentration game with the ducks by picking two at a time. If they choose a match, they can keep the duck pair. Whoever has the most pairs at the end wins the game!

Click the pictures below for links to the materials.

One of the most important things to me as a teacher is getting students engaged in the activity. That is why hands-on activities are always my go-to when choosing what to put in my Teaching Totes. STEM activities always deliver, which is why I put together this St. Patrick’s Day Build a Bridge activity.

For this activity, I gathered rainbow tongue depressors, gold coins, festive plastic cups and green foam cubes. One easy way to make an activity festive is to use the materials you already have but only pull out the festive colors. So if you have snap cubes or unifix cubes, just grab the green ones! Same with colored blocks, pom poms, etc.

Before I put this activity into the Teaching Tote, I did try it out with my own children to make sure it was kid approved! If definitely passed the test. I showed Lillian and Emmett the materials and challenged them to build a bridge that could hold as many gold coins as possible. They both got right to work. Emmett built a structure that could hold more weight. He tried balancing different items from the room on top of it. Lillian built a structure that could balance many gold coins. Her first attempt fell over pretty easily so we talked about revising her plan so that she could come up with a new and better idea. She then built a much more stable structure and was able to balance almost all of the coins we had on top. This one is sure to be a hit with your preschoolers!

One of my favorite skills to practice with young children is visual discrimination. This Build a Leprechaun Task Card Activity is the perfect way to strengthen both visual discrimination and fine motor skills. In order to set this one up, place the Build a Leprechaun mats (boy or girl mats to choose from) in front of your preschoolers. Provide the leprechaun cut outs in reach – hats, beards, shirts, pants, and shoes. Have your preschooler pick a card and use the pieces to recreate the same leprechaun. Challenge them to build several different ones. If they make a mistake, you can guide them to self correct by saying, “Let’s make sure this matches.” or “Let’s check this.” You can also make this an open ended activity by allowing them to use the pieces to make their own leprechauns. They will have so much fun with this one!!

Speaking of fine motor skills, here is an amazing way to strengthen the muscles in little hands!! This wooden rainbow has spaces that will hold little color pom poms. Your preschooler can use the tongs to carefully place each pom pom in the desired place. They can choose to create a traditional rainbow or their own colorful design. If your preschooler doesn’t want to attend to this activity long enough to fill all the holes, try taking turns with them so that you carry some of the burden of filling it in. This will encourage building stamina and lengthening attention span.

This rainbow activity is included in the St. Patrick’s Day Teaching Tote. But you can find your own by clicking on the picture below.

With Teaching Totes, I also want to incorporate early literacy and numeracy skills into the activities. Of course with preschoolers, the best kind of learning is the learning that feels like play. I’ve created a few hands-on activities to introduce and practice letters, numbers and counting.

First I will show you the St. Patrick’s Day Light Activity. This is a super fun way to practice naming letters and numbers while searching for gold! This activity comes with 3 sets of cards, uppercase letters, lowercase letters and numbers 1 – 20. Challenge your preschooler to find out which rainbows have gold by shining light on the back of each rainbow card. Some cards will reveal a pot of gold and some will not. On the recording sheet, your preschooler can circle or color the ones with gold as they go!

We use this light tablet for light activities because I love how it lays flat on the table and multiple children can utilize it at once. If you prefer, you can use hand held flashlights and they will work just the same. You can also set up this activity near a window and have your preschoolers hold the cards against the window to reveal the pots of gold. Whatever works best for you!

If you need any of the materials, I took the time to find them for you. Just click the pictures below.

Counting is also an important skill to learn in the preschool years. I’ve included two St. Patrick’s Day themed activities to practice counting with your little learners.

The first counting activity is a chant that you can use in circle time, small groups or one-on-one. The chant goes like this:

Rainbow, rainbow. We found a pot of gold. How many gold coins does it hold?

Say the chant with your preschoolers before choosing a pot of gold card. The cards include numbers 1 – 20, but you can pick out the specific numbers you’d like to practice if you don’t want to do that many.

This activity comes with 3 optional recording sheets. Once your preschooler counts the coins on the card, they can trace the number that they find. Use the sheet that works best for your learners. This makes differentiating easy!

One thing I really love about this activity is that it easily lends itself to a hands-on option. Remember those which’s cauldrons from Halloween? If you have one or some, you can use them instead of the pot of gold cards. Just add gold coins or pennies to the cauldrons and you now have pots of gold! Preschoolers LOVE getting to peek inside the little pots of gold, dump them out, and count the coins with their own hands.

Another counting activity that I’ve included in the St. Patrick’s Day Teaching Tote is this 10 Lucky Shamrocks Rhyme. You can count down from 10 or 5, whatever is best for your little learners. Use the shamrocks on a stick to act out the verses and substitute the names of your own preschoolers as you say the rhyme together. It’s easy to add a little motion to the rhyme as well. This is how it goes.

10 lucky shamrocks grow on the ground.

Waiting for you (point to your child) to come look around (use your hands like binoculars).

They reach for the sun (reach up high)

(Name) picks one (take a shamrock from the bunch)

Now 9 lucky shamrocks wait to be found.

Continue the rhyme, counting down to zero.

I used craft foam from the floral section at Dollar Tree to prop up the shamrocks on a stick and make it easy to pick them. I also found the colored popsicle sticks and Dollar Tree and picked out just the green ones for this activity. This rhyme is FREE in my shop. You can grab it for your learners by clicking the icon below.

Speaking of FREEBIES, here’s another Teaching Tote activity that is also free in my TpT shop. These Shamrock Match the Middle Cards are a great way to practice visual discrimination. Your preschooler can look at the shamrock in the middle of each card and identify the shamrocks that match that one in the middle exactly. Use festive loose parts or clips to cover the matching shamrocks. This will also help strengthen those fine motor skills too!

One more thing!! A Teaching Tote is not complete without a fun craft to wrap everything up! Take a look at these watercolor shamrocks! This craft is easy to do and is so eye catching!

We started this craft by stamping shamrocks all over the page in black paint. We used shamrock shaped pancake molds that we already had on hand. I found these in the Target Dollar Spot last year. And since those items aren’t available anymore, I did take the time to find a set of Shamrock cookie cutters that will work just as well. Just click on the picture below if you’d like to grab them. You can also use bell peppers cut in half for an easy shamrock shape.

After stamping the shamrock shapes in black paint, we let our papers dry completely. Once dry, we used watercolor paints to fill in each shamrock with different colors. You can choose to stick with festive shades of greens or use all the colors of the rainbow. Either way, the end product will be stunning! My favorite kind of crafts have no two products that look alike. I love how Lillian overlapped her stamps. It added space for so many colors and depth to her final product!

That’s it for the St. Patrick’s Day Teaching Tote! If you’d like to take a closer look at any of the printable activities described in this blog post, click the pictures below.

Don’t forget to grab these FREEBIES!

If you are local to Mount Airy, MD or the surrounding areas, you can rent all of these activities to use with your own little learners! Click the Teaching Totes icon to learn more.

Thank you for being here, friends!! 💕💕

Alphabet, Counting, Spring, St. Patrick's Day

Rainbow Activities for Preschool FREE Printable

March 13, 2023 Lauren Johnson

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!

Counting, St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick’s Day Preschool Math Activities FREEBIE

March 16, 2022 Lauren Johnson

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!