6 St. Patrick’s Day Lesson Plan Ideas

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Luck is believing you’re lucky.”

~Tennessee Williams

St. Patrick’s Day Celebration

We celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by exploring Ireland through art, music, and engineering. Here are some of our favorite activities to make this celebration a meaningful learning experience. We have added links to most of the resources you need, so prep will be a breeze.

Music & Dance

It is fun just to hop around and enjoy Irish music.

If you would like to take this lesson a little deeper, dancing the jig is great exercise and very easy to learn.

Art

This is one of our (Almost) No Prep Art Lessons. You probably have all the materials you need in you classroom. Students draw the shamrock and create the lines with a ruler. You can learn more about this lesson right here.

St Patrick's Day Shamrock

Food

Taste the Rainbow

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We use every opportunity to promote healthy eating. Most kids will at least try a food offered in the classroom. We assemble a fruit rainbow in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. The cut fruit and berries are offered buffet style. The kids help themselves to the different fruits. They later chart their fruit platter in their journals. We have more healthy party snack ideas right here.

Engineering

The day before St. Patrick’s Day out students design and create leprechaun traps in class. This is one of the our favorite activities of the whole year. Many teachers have kids create traps at home. They often look more polished than our crazy classroom creations.

Social Studies

If you or your students are interested in learning more about St. Patrick you can watch some of these videos.

Leaf Rubbing

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Autumn

The morns are meeker than they were,

The nuts are getting brown;

The berry’s cheek is plumper,

The rose is out of town.

 

The maple wears a gayer scarf,

The field a scarlet gown.

Lest I should be old-fashioned,

I’ll put a trinket on.

~Emily Dickinson

Leaf Rubbing

Leaf rubbing is a great activity any time of the year. It definitely is a favorite in the fall when leaves change colors. Simply rub a crayon over a leave placed under a piece of copy paper; like magic, The leave appears in front of your eyes.

Materials:

  • Paper
  • Crayons
  • Leaves

Leaf Hunt

We start this activity by going on a leaf hunt in our yard. The best leaves come from our sycamore trees. They have the distinct maple leave shape and are excellent for rubbing.

It is very helpful to have a collection of leaves already prepared. This way every student will have great leaves, even if they don’t find any on the walk. We even press and laminate really nice leaves in order to use them over and over. Pressed leaves also make for great fall decoration.

This activity is a great extension to exploring Fibonacci numbers in nature. You can read more about using the Fibonacci sequence to deepen number sense right here.

Art & Poetry

The rubbings also lend themselves to visualize your favorite fall poems. One of our favorites is  Autumn by Emily Dickinson. We charted the poem and the class reads it chorally during our Morning Meeting. Students later copy the poem for penmanship practice; a great fall keepsake that is greatly appreciated by our families.

 

Sugar Skull Art Project

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This is a super simple art activity that comes out amazing every time. You can either use the sugar skulls and simply color them, or have your students come up with their own version. We usually do both. First, we have the kids color, and then they create their own sugar skull drawings. We loved to use markers, but oil pastels or crayons look great as well.

Materials

  • Sugar skull printouts
  • Colored markers or crayons
  • Colorful construction paper

We introduce our students to the Day of the Dead, and then show them examples of the whimsical and colorful skulls that brighten this Holiday. We give each student a copy of our sugar skull and bright construction paper. They simply color the patterns, cut out the skull, and glue it on colorful construction paper.

We have more great art projects on our (Almost) No Prep Art Projects page.

Community Mural

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

~John Donne

A community mural is a wonderful group project. This is an (Almost) No Prep Art activity because we use materials available to us and students create every aspect of it. Nothing is pre-cut or copied. We think the results are pretty awesome.

Materials:

  • Butcher paper
  • Tempera paint
  • Buttons
  • Sequins
  • Construction paper
  • Color
  • Copy paper

These are only suggestions. We use what we have in the room. Recycled materials also work really well. You can see in the picture that somehow googly eyes and puff balls got involved.  We must have put them in the wrong activity box.

Procedure:

Outline your streets and landmark with pencil. Assign different kids to paint the landscape. In the meantime the rest of the class starts to create houses, cars, and people. You can demonstrate how to do it or just see what they come up with.  The only thing that is very important is that the kids cut out their contributions completely. It sometimes takes them a while to understand that they cannot add their own background. We tell the kids to make the houses about the size of the palm of their hand but they still come out all different sizes. We arrange the artwork and the kids glue it on. Making a community mural?  We would love to feature it on the website! Have fun!

Gustav Klimt Trees

Gustave Klimt Tree of Life

Gustav Klimt was the son of a gold engraver and included gold in many of his art pieces. The bold colors and shapes lend themselves to being recreated by small hands. The Tree of Life is one of his most famous works and often replicated.

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Materials

  • Construction paper
  • Tempera paint
  • Brushes in different sizes
  • Paper plates
  • Easel or newspaper to protect the working surface

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Procedure

Introduce Klimt and his work. Google images of the tree of life can be found here. Demonstrate loading the brush with gold paint and how to create the tree shape. Let the art work dry after painting the tree. Continue painting with white, silver, orange, and black tempera paint.  The shapes really pop if they are outlined with black paint.

Paul Klee Castles


Paul Klee castles are a great way to introduce kids to this wonderful artist.

Materials

  • Newsprint paper
  • Pastels
  • Marker
  • Watercolor

Procedure

Introduce the students to Paul Klee. Show the class several examples of his work. Demonstrate how to use shapes to draw a castle. Explain that they will make the outline with black oil pastel and then color in the shapes with watercolor and marker. Have fun!