St. Patrick's Day Activities and Crafts for Preschool and Toddlers

Have You Been Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day?

We’ve been having lots of green-colored fun and have been reading lots of St. Patrick’s day books around here! I was talking to a teacher friend of mine yesterday and she said last year, her class was fortunate enough to see a DOUBLE RAINBOW on St. Patrick’s day. How exciting. I hope we get to catch a rainbow this year too!

Inspired by a video by Cullen over on youtube, we decided to play a little “hide and seek” game with Shamrocks.

I grabbed a Shamrock Pattern Printable over at Sherbet Blossom, but just used one Shamrock as a template so I could make the best use of my green paper.

After the Shamrock’s were all cut out, I wrote letters on them all. The capital letter on one side and the lowercase letter on the other side.

All the kids were asleep (yes, all five of them!), so it was the perfect opportunity to hide the Shamrocks around the house. I picked some pretty obvious places, but also a few trickier places so we could “check” to make sure we got them all a few times.

Pretty obvious one here.

This one didn’t take too long for them to find either.

Hiding in the side of the couch — this actually took much longer to find then I thought.

The kids loved running all over the house and finding Shamrocks. Every time they found one, I would say, “Oh good job! You found the Letter ___!” After we had found about 15 shamrocks, I gathered up all the kids and we checked to see if we had found them all by lining them up in alphabetical order. The kids loved practicing the alphabet as we went along. As soon as we found a missing letter, we were off in search of that shamrock!

Pretty soon the collection filled out and we got a lot of letter practice in the meantime. I had the kids point to the letter that their name started with and we would have done a little more letter work, but they were begging to do another round of hide and seek shamrocks!

We also took scraps of green construction paper and made Shamrock collages. You could use the pattern from Spoonful (check above link) or just draw one like me.

Finished!

I noticed I’ve been slacking a little when it comes to fine motor practice, so I’ll be looking for more activities to step up my game. Here’s a couple ideas I found on Pinterest:

What kind of St. Patrick Fun are you planning?

About the Author

Lindsey Whitney is a blogger over at Growing Kids Ministry. A blog designed to help parents, teachers, and Children’s Ministry workers who want to help the kids they love grow in their faith. You can connect with her via twitter or on facebook.