St. Patrick's Day

Books

Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato by Tomie de'Paola

The Enormous Turnip retold by Debbie Slier

Or The Great Big Enormous Turnip by Alexei Tolstoy

   The Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow

What Makes a Rainbow-- A Magic Ribbon Book

Potatoes by Claire Llewellyn

One Potato: A Counting Book of Potato Prints by Diana Pomeroy

Literacy/Writing ideas

• Write three wishes to go with the wish poem.  We write ours on a shamrock (picture above).  Then we were them on a yarn necklace.

 I keep three wishes handy

 In case I chance to meet,

 Any day a leprechaun

 Coming down the street.

• Write about how to catch a leprechaun.

• Write about potato foods.  We make a potato food booklet to tell about all the kinds of potato foods. 

• Compare and contrast Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato and The Enormous Turnip.  Make a Venn diagram.  Chart words that are synonyms for big.

Social Studies/Science/Art

• Observe how a potato will sprout.

• Make leprechaun hats.

• Milk rainbow experiment: Pour a cup of whole milk into a pie tin.  Put two or three drops of each color food coloring at different edges of the pan.  Drip a few drops of Sunlight dish detergent down one edge of the pan.  See what happens!

• Make potato prints by stamping half a potato in paint.

• Have children order circles of different sizes (and different colors) to make a rainbow.

• Use colored rice and white glue to make each layer of the rainbow.

• The leprechaun visits our classroom and leaves messes, surprises and letters.

Math

• The pictures above show some of the St. Patrick's Day math centers I used.  The children also did addition with the gold.  The gold is spray painted rocks (the type used in an aquarium).

• Sort and graph Lucky Charms cereal.

Links

• Lucky Charms Then and Now (Scroll down to find Lucky Charms.)

• Mr. Potato Head

• Idaho Potatoes

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