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.

Why Mozart Should Be Your Teaching Assistant

Albert Einstein playing his violin.

The secret is out, classical music has a positive impact on focus, learning, and mood. At the Little Digital Schoolhouse we like to call it the “Mozart Effect”.  It truly works. You simply turn on the Pachelbel Canon and the class relaxes and quiets down. As you monitor your classroom you can almost feel the sigh of relief as students are able to focus.

Science backs our experience that classical music can greatly enhance the quality and quantity of learning. Researchers in France have found that students, who listen to classical music during a lecture, scored significantly higher on assessments than students who listened to the lecture without background music. Another study at UC Irvine found that music also enhances memory functions in Alzheimer patients. Even plants seem to grow better with Mozart. In 1973 Dorothy Retallack showed with her experiments that plants grow better when classical music is played to them.

The proof is in the pudding however.  Why not try it? Here are some of our favorite selections for your listening pleasure:

  1. Bach, Suite No. 3 in D Major
  2. Pachelbel, Canon
  3. Schubert, Ave Maria
  4. Kreisler, Liebesleid
  5. Strauss, Blue Danube
  6. Mozart, Eine kleine Nachtmusik

Itunes also offers classical selections that have been compiled for this purpose.  Nice examples are:

  1. Classical Music for Meditation and Yoga
  2. Start Smart: Learning Tools For Your Child’s Mind
  3. Smart Kids: Invigorating Music for Young Minds

Enjoy!