Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Today I tried to get to work early today – but it didn’t work out in the end! Which made me very stressed! But somehow – everything got done. When I got to class I put a little pot of gold filled with plastic gold coins in the Jungle (read: the playhouse) with a note from the leprechaun. I had found glittery plastic shamrocks (1 for each child) on sale and I sprinkled them around on the floor. Then, using double stick tape, I taped down little leprechaun footprints. One set leading to the pot of gold and another leading to our circle time area rug where I had laid some things out. If I’d had more time, I would have put footprints leading all over the room.
Ms. Bennet showed up at this point and together we rearranged the toys on each shelf, spilled some toys out of their containers, took out all the green toys and laid them around the room to make it look like they had been played with, and got out some paper and green crayons to make it look like someone was making green drawings. To top it all off I took our foam shamrocks (which we have been using to pattern and sort by color and size) and sprinkled them all over the tables and floor! It looked great! Then I had 2 mini leprechaun hats that I put in strategic areas around the room.
The scene was set. When I led our class into the room – they immediately noticed the changes! We asked them who could have done this to our room – and they knew – it was those pesky leprechauns! So I told them to see what they found as they looked around the room! They were running looking for things – seeing what the leprechauns had gotten out – they loved the pot of gold! They loved the glittery shamrocks! They cleaned up the room – all the while complaining about “Why couldn’t the leprechauns clean up?” They had a great time!
Later that morning we played a shamrock number game. I had 20 paper shamrocks (numbered 1 – 20) laid out on the floor in a circle (number side down). I played some Irish music and they walked around the shamrocks. When the music stopped they had to pick up the shamrock closest to them and we went around the circle with each child saying their number. Then we placed them back on the floor (number down) and played again. When we had done this quite a few times, we helped the children make a number line with all the numbers, counted them, and then called on children to go point to certain numbers. All in all, a great day! And each child got to take home 2 gold coins and 1 glittery green shamrock! And a sparkly shamrock headband we all made today! Good times!
Teaching to Dream 