Today, we invited some friends over for some St. Patrick’s Day fun. Getting together for a learning ‘playdate’ is always a hit! Of course, I forgot my camera when we had friends over for activities, but here are as few with the finished products!
If you haven’t fallen under the spell of Tomie dePaola, I highly encourage checking them out! We love Patrick – Patron Saint of England.
But don’t just take my word for it. Stephanie over at The Little Stuff of Life gave it rave reviews today as well.
We started our time gathering in a circle and reading this book and then followed up with talking about the legend of St. Patrick using the shamrock to illustrate the trinity to the people of Ireland. It was a fun introduction to the concept of God in three persons that can even boggle our minds at times.
Afterwards, we then went and made some shamrocks of our own by letting the kids cut out green hearts. Since they were so young, I had traced them earlier. The older ones were turned loose with scissors and the younger one’s had help from their mom.
And then imitated St. Patrick in taking the good news of God’s love for us with a relay race and passing on the ‘message’! The little ones just sort of ran around, but the older one’s actually enjoyed racing and telling each other of God’s love!
Xander wanted to show off the “Good News” baton.
We finished off our morning with some shamrock cookies. (Sorry no pictures. Too yummy!)
Our boys have also enjoyed reading the following books about leprechauns! It’s so cute to see them looking about for ‘little people’!
Clever Tom and the Leprechaun: An Old Irish Story
The Leprechaun’s Gold
Tim O’Toole and the Wee Folk: An Irish Tale
Seal Maiden: A Celtic Musical
For me: How the Irish Saved Civilization
Next year, if I’m up for feeling more crafty, I might try one of these creative ideas:
- Super cool sensory tub idea for preschoolers. I’m not ruling this out for anytime of year – especially our long hot summers when there is not much opportunity to go outside.
- Paper Leprechaun beard. Sure to be a hit in these parts…
- Adorable felt shamrocks. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE these!
- Shamrock crayons. I love this creative take on re-using crayon bits.
- Yogurt Pretzel Shamrocks. YUM!
- Green Smoothie Popsicles. If my kids will eat pureed spinach pops, I won’t just reserve these for St. Patty’s day…
All that’s left of our fun green day is to head on over to my parents for some Corned Beef and Cabbage. She didn’t receive the name “Colene” for nothing. Gotta love my roots! (My Irish grandfather loved the name Keegan -“little fiery one”. He knew several Keegan’s in his Irish Catholic school growing up…)
What a beautiful first and middle name. (Can I say that about a boys name???)
Awesome stuff. I put “How the Irish Saved Civilization” on my Wishlist in Amazon.
I come from a very large, very Irish Catholic family and we have a lot of Irish names in my family. The MOST Irish name would be my youngest son’s. His name is Kean which is a VERY Irish name that has variants such as: Cian, Kian, etc. We opted for the version we did…unfortunately people don’t seem to know what to say when they read it! But otherwise everyone says, “I like it, that’s cool.” Oh, and his middle name is Padraic which is the Irish version of Patrick.
Came over from the Hip Homeschool Hop!
See how far behind I am in my reading! 😉
This is a great post! Lots of great info. And you did manage to capture a few very cute photos – but it’s hard to remember to get out the camera when so much is going on. Definitely bookmarking this for later.
A post like this makes me wish E was older…
We had so much fun and I learned lots! Thank you for hosting and putting this together.