Toddler-approved St. Patrick's Day Activities
It's March! Hooray! We're starting to see St. Patrick's Day decorations everywhere, so we decided to join in on the fun. I've been scouring the web for fun and enriching activities for Pooky (who is now two)! Following are the activities I chose to explore with her, and they were each a success.
st.Pattyplaydohcollage
st.pattyricebinCollage
shamrockwindowclingCollage
shamrockcountingCollage
rainbowCollage
Easy St. Patrick's Day Paper Wreath for Kids
Of course I always like to add play-doh activities to whatever theme we're exploring. So I whipped up a batch of green play-doh and introduced her to the shamrock cookie cutter. *See below for the link to the recipe I found and used.Another fun thing I keep on hand is the rice sensory bin. I'm still amazed at how much Pooky loves to play in the rice! I just change out the extras to match our current theme and to keep it interesting. Everything I put in there was just found around the house or in the Target $1 bins.Another item I found in the $1 bin was St. Patrick's Day themed window clings. These were rejected at first because of the gel-like texture, but Pooky's curiosity quickly overcame her hesitation with the new texture. She now puts these on the windows and then removes them and puts them back on their plastic sheets repeatedly several times a day. I feel like I scored with this one because it only cost me a dollar, and yet it's a fun way for her to work on her fine motor skills while adding some themed decorations to our living room.At Pooky's recent 2nd birthday party, she surprised me by naming the numbers on her growth chart. So I decided to create some counting-type activities with some of the other items I got from the Target bins. I created a counting "worksheet" puzzle with the pieces of a cut up gold shamrock plastic necklace and my copier. It was great for fine-motor skills and one-to-one correspondence (placing the numbers and shamrocks on top of their corresponding pictures), and it also gave us a chance to talk about what the numbers really represent. Also, I got the idea to do a "scavenger hunt" and counting activity from this blog using shamrock coins, but I altered it to just work on the numbers 1-3. The idea is that I "hide" the coins around the room and she finds them and places them in the coin outlines on the worksheet. Then we count them and talk about them. This was the first time we did any type of "hunting/I spy" game. Pooky got the hang of it right away and had a blast with it. We've been playing this almost every day for the past week, and she still giggles so much when she finds each coin (even though it's hidden in plain sight). I'm pretty sure she's going to love hunting for Easter eggs this year now that she knows what to do! The last activity we did was a fruit loop rainbow. I printed a rainbow outline from www.firstpalette.com and colored in the basic rainbow colors. Then, since Pooky isn't coordinated with glue yet, I put a line of liquid glue on each layer of the rainbow one at a time. Pooky was all too eager to match up the fruit loops with the rainbow color strips. *Note: don't do this right before lunch. She ended up eating way more of the cereal than I care to admit. lol I think we'll do a similar activity with the rainbow fruit loops separating them by color onto toothpicks. We also had fun making this easy St. Patrick's Day Paper Wreath. If your interested in how we did it, check out the post here.Well that's what we've been up to in preparation for St. Patrick's Day. I'll be on the lookout for more activities that I think will be fun for us. What themed activities are you doing with your toddler?*Play dough recipe from Learning4KidsNow come check out all these great blogs I'll be linking to this week.http://rainydaymum.co.uk/category/tuesday-tots-linkyhttp://www.1plus1plus1equals1.net/tag/tot-school-gathering-place/http://b-inspiredmama.com/category/play-and-learn/kids-co-op/http://www.sunscholars.com/http://www.icanteachmychild.com/2014/02/show-share-saturday-link-23/