St. Patrick's Day: Traps, Magical Powder & More!

Leprechaun Trap Ideas!

We had a blast with our St. Patrick's Day activities this week! We're on Spring Break this week, so we celebrated a week early. We had Silly McGilly visit our classroom and play harmless tricks like turning all of  the books upside down, putting gold and green gems in our Sensory Table and draping our SmartBoard in green scarves. One of my favorite things to do is have the children build Leprechaun Traps with their families - they always turn out so incredible! Here's some of the traps from this year:

I love this pipe cleaner ladder!

This trap used golden Easter eggs to try to lure the leprechaun!

Love that they used a real stick to prop open this trap!

The best thing about this trap was the surprise inside:


 It was filled with treats - enough for everyone in the class to get one of each item! Love this family!

 This mini trap was adorable - inside was a tiny lego chair for the leprechaun to rest on!

On Friday we set up all the traps right before recess:

 We sprinkled Lucky Charms cereal around the traps to attract the leprechauns.


 When we came back, all of the traps had been sprung, but we didn't catch a leprechaun :(
He did leave us milk, cookies and Magical Leprechaun Powder though!
(when we mixed the powder with milk it turned into green pudding!)

We watched the Roy G. Biv video on YoutTube and learned about the colors of the rainbow, and then created our own using scrapbook paper:

I put an arch of glue down and had the kids work on one color at a time, to simplify the process.
Here they are in the hallway, with our Torn Paper Paper Plate Leprechauns:
I had the kids cut out their own eyes, and since most couldn't do circles yet, they produced a lot of triangles, squares and rectangles! I love how it makes them even more unique!

My favorite part was turning my kiddos into leprechauns! I use this pattern to create the leprechaun hat and a beard, then took each child's photo in the costume. I printed out the photos and cut them out to display with our "If I was a leprechaun..." writing.


In Math Center we used my St. Patrick's Day  Roll & Cover mats with lima beans that were spray painted green on one side:

And in Letter Center we used our green gel baggies with my St. Patrick's Day Alphabet Match-Up cards!

If you want to plan a leprechaun's visit to your own classroom, check out my freebie on TPT: How to Plan a Leprechaun Visit!

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/How-to-Plan-a-Leprechaun-Visit-217474?aref=m9m5jsx9

Dr. Seuss Week

Dr. Seuss Bulletin Board Ideas

As every elementary teacher is probably aware, this was Dr. Seuss week. I've won the Best Door Decoration contest several years running, so I was prepared to bring it this year and decided to do my whole bulletin board for the contest! We did a little bit each day, and I planned to have it completely finished Thursday for voting on Friday.
This was last year's display, I made each child into a different Seuss character!

Then on Thursday I got a call from my husband during morning recess that Sullivan had fallen at daycare and he was taking him to Urgent Care for stitches. I had that moment of immense guilt - do I stay at school since my husband is already handling it, or do I leave and go be with my baby anyways? Yes, I actually considered staying at school when my 2 year old was getting stitches. I'm not sure if that qualifies me for the Worst Mommy award or the Best Teacher award. I ended up taking 15 minutes to prep stuff for the afternoon and then taking off. I swear, holding him down for the lidocaine shots and 3 stitches was the worst experience ever!
Look at this face! He's got the pathetic look down pat! He got a popsicle after the procedure, and that's all he took away from the whole experience - not the accident itself, not the blood or the 20 minutes of screaming bloody murder as he was held down but "The nice man gave me popsicle!" Ahh, the power of frozen sugar water!

After we got him home and calmed down, I snuck back to school for the last hour of the afternoon and then stayed until 7pm - prepping for a sub for Friday and finishing the bulletin board for the contest:


It's not exactly what I had planned, but I'm pretty darn proud of it anyways! I got the idea for the background with the window, curtains and silhouettes from Buzzing with Ms. B. It was so simple to do - the hardest part was scrunching the crepe paper for the top border lol!

We used apple cutouts for our Ten Apples Up On Top (and I cannot get the song version out of my head! LOVE it:

Some of my kiddos chose to just sort the apples and use one color, others did a random mix and still others made patterns:

We did handprint Things 1-20 for The Cat in the Hat:

On the bottom edge are the shoes we did for The Foot Book, we traced our feet on construction paper, colored them and cut them out, and then compared them. Our biggest and smallest foot were placed on the sign, and the others displayed on the bottom edge of the board:

My personal favorite part though, was the "Dr. Seuss" spelled out at the top - the kids laid on the floor in the shape of the letters and I took a picture from on top of a table. I colorized them on my computer and I love the way they came out!


On Friday I stayed home with Sully, so I had the substitute read Green Eggs and Ham and then I brought in Deviled Green Eggs and Ham Sandwiches as a snack in the afternoon.
I used food coloring to dye the mustard green, and to to dye the egg yolk mixture for the deviled eggs. Since I wasn't there to cook the eggs and ham in class, this was my compromise! The kids were cautious, but most ended up eating it - with several asking for seconds. Funnily enough, it was mostly the boys who were leery of eating it, the girls dove right in lol! 

Next week is our last week before Spring Break (yay!) so we're doing a ton of Leprechaun fun! Check out my freebie: How to Plan a Leprechaun Visit and then grab my free Lucky Leprechaun Graphing  and my Lucky Measuring Fun pack!
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Lucky-Measuring-Fun-A-St-Patricks-Day-Themed-Common-Core-Aligned-Pack-552722

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