We had a St. Patrick's Day celebration today in preschool. My heritage is Irish and this was a holiday growing up that was full of magic and surprises. The kids learned a bit about the lore of Ireland. We read Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato, an Irish folktale by Tomie dePaola.
Before they got to school, the Leprechaun visited the classroom. He's tricky, clever, and whimsical. He left a trail of shamrocks throughout the room, so it was easy to tell where he went. There were some places that had a whole mess of shamrock footprints. We're pretty sure that's where he stopped to do a jig.
He used his magic to turn all sorts of things his favorite color--GREEN. It took awhile for the kids to notice them all. The water in the toilet and the water table were green. The glue for our art collages turned green. The collage materials were all green (yesterday they were many colors). The only markers in the classroom were green. The chocolate chop muffins, grapes, and milk at snack all had a green hue. He even turned the teacher's water green.
He also left a bunch of sparkles in the rice table and he hid treasures in there--lucky green coins. He left us a note telling us about all of his antics. Here it is.
We still followed our regular schedule, but all day long we kept finding more treats and treasures. As we collected the treats, candies in green wrappers, we kept counting and re-counting to find out if we had them all. We practiced counting up past 60 many times today. We figured out at the end of play time we still needed to find 5 more pieces. During clean up, we found four of the five.At music, one of the kids noticed the last piece of candy was hidden on Beth's ear!! How did that leprechaun manage to hide one there? We learned to do a jig. Beth knew the steps from when she was a little kid. There is a lot of jumping and kicking in place and you have to keep your hands by your sides as you move.
At dismissal, everyone got to choose three treats and a treasure to take home as a gift from the leprechaun.
Aaron loved "green day"! He said he had so much fun!
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