Toddler Activities for St. Patrick's Day: Last minute St. Patty's

I feel like I have these posts for every holiday...last minute activities! That's how we do here in the Phipps household. So here they are:

The Origin of St. Patrick's Day
(Tweak it as you will, of course)
St. Patrick's Day is a holiday where we celebrate a man named St. Patrick from a country called Ireland. He was a good man and wanted to teach other people in Ireland about his beliefs. He used a shamrock, or a green clover, to teach others about the trinity (God, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost). He died on March 17th, 461 A.D. which is why we celebrate St. Patrick's Day by wearing green, decorating with shamrocks, and looking for little Irish leprechauns searching for their pots of gold!

Shamrock Memory Game

We've been playing a lot of "memory" in our house lately and I thought I'd add a fun St. Patty's day twist to it.

1. Cut out twenty shamrocks, using this tutorial, and write the numbers 1-10 on the backs, twice. Two number 1's, 2's, 3's, etc. We put green smiley face stickers on the opposite side.

Our CUTE little neighbor came over just in time to play with us.

Mix them up and lay them out in rows.

As we're playing, I try to stop after someone's turn and repeat what we just saw, "Remember, this one's a four, and this one is a six. Remember where they are!"


Crafty Rainbows

I saw this next idea on No Time for Flashcards and thought we'd give it a try.

1. Gather all your scraps from your activity time closet: construction paper strips/leftovers, random beads, buttons, pom-poms, stickers. We even had a handful of balloons in there.

2. Place all of your scraps into one large bowl and have your preschooler sort them by color into smaller bowls. (This should keep them busy for a while.)

3. Once they've sorted, you can use white poster board or a flattened paper bag for your rainbow. I let my daughter draw her own rainbow, telling her the order of the colors (remember ROYGBIV?). Then we placed a line of glue on each color for her to paste her scraps.






Unfortunately, I don't have a finished product yet. We're still finishing our rainbow.

Tomorrow we're having a St. Patrick's Day party with some friends and I'll be cooking up some of this:

(I thought these would be fun to have on their plates)
Martha Stewart

and of course...
Martha Stewart
(Mine won't look quite this good)
P.S. Did you read this article about the origin of corned beef and cabbage?

and for dessert...
Family Fun
Yum. I'm actually not a jello fan, but my girls are REALLY excited for this.