St. Patrick's Day Celebration

It was St. Patrick's Day this week! This is always such a fun holiday to celebrate and this year it was made more fun with our Mother Goose Time celebration kit. I love that they send these extra kits each month to go along with a holiday that is happening.

We started the day by having our annual bowl of Lucky Charms cereal. I hate giving them cereal with marshmallows in it because they usually just eat the marshmallows and leave the cereal, but we make an exception for St. Patrick's Day.

After our breakfast we played the Hot Potato game from the celebration kit. I didn't get pictures of this because I was playing with them and we had a lot of fun. After we played a couple rounds of hot potato we played the coin toss game.

I had my daughter add up all of our scores each time to help her with her adding skills. This wasn't a very challenging game for her but she was able to practice using mental math which we practice with her math curriculum and it was a great math warm up for her before doing her math page for the day. This also helped make the game more suitable for her skill level. After we were finished with this game and my daughter was done with her math page we decided to do the My Treasures art project. These came out really cute. My daughter was able to do hers by herself and my son needed a little help. To make it less frustrating for him I wrote the things he told me that he treasures on the coins for him. I also helped him draw the pot.

While they were coloring and working on their art projects I started working on our lunch. We decided to have a St. Patrick's Day tea party. I found some really cute dishes at the thrift store near us so we decided to bring those out. I made the Rainbow Skewer Snack Recipe that was included in the celebration kit. I also made some chicken nuggets, we had left over cake from my daughters birthday the day before, and I made some Irish Breakfast Tea.

I had my daughter read the 5 Green Shamrocks Rhyme from the Celebration kit and my son played with the shamrock story pieces as she read.

She also read another St. Patrick's Day book that taught us a little background on the holiday. I also took some time to read some Irish Poems, and Irish blessings while we had our tea. We also listened to Irish music. I tried to make it as rich of a cultural experience as I could. This is one of the ways I am able to use Mother Goose Time with both my kids even though their age and skill levels are very different. It is so easy to take the Mother Goose Time topics and expand on them. The library and the internet are such great resources that I can turn any of the Mother Goose Time lessons into a meaningful age appropriate lesson for my 8 year old. The nice thing about this is that it is less stressful for everyone to be learning and working on the same things.

After reading the stories my daughter decided that she wanted to try making a leprechaun trap like the one she read about in one of the stories. The rest of the afternoon was spent going through our recycling and art supplies to find materials that would work for a trap. My son decided to try making one as well. It was so fun to see what they both came up with. They each worked so hard on coming up with a trap and I enjoyed hearing the stories they told me about how the traps would work. This was a totally spontaneous project that I didn't plan which I think made it more fun. They had to really think about what supplies they wanted to use and find because it wasn't pre set up for them.