ST. PATRICK'S DAY: PK-3

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Ana's Week
 
Any week spent celebrating a holiday is a fun week, but on a week spent celebrating a holiday that I’ve always loved but never known much about, I enjoyed myself more than usual! I love having corned beef and wearing green, but I never knew much about St. Patrick and why we celebrated the day (other than that it is believed that he sent all of the snakes out of Ireland and therefore is my hero). Both of my girls loved playing in the St. Patrick’s Day rice bucket (always a favorite of them both), but the big hit of the week was the pot of gold scavenger hunt. Over and over again, Aria and I would take turns being leprechauns and hunting for gold hidden throughout the house to fill up our pot. The green scavenger hunt was also fun, easy, and Aria was really proud of herself for finding everything on the list. Aria also loved the skittles science activities that we did, especially the part where she got to enjoy eating skittles at the end. (I know, I know, ruining all the hard work of our healthy lifestyles week)! My biggest success of the week was spending time baking Irish soda bread for friends. Aria helped with every part of the baking and was super enthusiastic about the activity. I love that she loves spending time with me in the kitchen these days!

The hardest thing to find for this week was information and activities focused on St. Patrick. Either they were too complex for PK-3 or didn’t exist at all, so the video that I found about St. Patrick was a massively helpful find and actually taught me information about St. Patrick too! Aria watched it a few times and seemed to enjoy his story, so I highly recommend watching the St. Patrick Youtube video. Also, if you don’t want to spend a ton of money buying books or the time running to the library, there are actually a lot of St. Patrick’s Day books that you can find being read on Youtube. Aria loved the Night Before St. Patrick’s Day the best! 
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Make sure to spend the week above all else having fun and celebrating! We had several playdates during the week and Aria loved gifting her friends bread or doing St. Patrick’s Day themed tea parties. Getting friends to join in the party is a good way for the kids to get even more excited about the unit of the week! Though we will have to spend more time talking about Ireland in the future, we had a great time reviewing rainbows, pretending to be leprechauns, celebrating St. Patrick, and getting as green and festive as possible! Can’t wait to do it all again next year!

Jessica's Week

​Sometimes having a flexible mentality is not just a result of an uncooperative student. I had this week pretty much planned out when the opportunity arose to scrap the plan and follow Dave on a business trip instead. He was going to a remote area of PA that just so happens to house the Crayola Factory. Since we just had art week and “coloring the rainbow” sounded pretty St. Patrick adjacent, we packed up our homeschool materials and took learning on the road. For me this is absolutely a perk of not being enrolled in a program where trips have to be planned and coordinated with school schedules. It took about six hours to reach the town of Easton so we used our car trip time to get lots paperwork done. The favorite was alphabet and number sticker matching on shamrocks. It’s fun, great math and language practice, and peeling the stickers was good fine motor skill work too. We just went through like two packs of dot stickers so I’m glad a bought a bunch. We also practiced drawing simple shamrocks, I had T draw four circles that touched sides and then make a flower stem and color it all in green. Pretty basic, but she enjoyed the freeform drawing of something people could recognize. By the time we got to the hotel it was getting late so we took a quick swim and headed to bed.

Crayola doesn’t open till 10am and Taegan is always up by 7…especially in a hotel, so that gave us several hours of hotel room time in the morning. We brought some Lucky Charms Cereal (easy breakfast) and worked on counting, sorting, and even adding it. While she did that I set up a gold coin letter matching hunt. That might sound hard in such a confined space but Taegan loved finding all the new hotel room hiding places like empty closets, mini fridge, and safe.

Crayola itself was fantastic and not at all busy since it was a weekday and located in such a remote town. There are four floors of attractions and you can easily spend 4+ hours visiting it all. We made and named our own green St. Patrick's day crayon, toured the factory to watch how crayons are made, turned coloring pages into animated movies and 3rd moving paper creations, colored in a special black light room, and made melted crayon spin art. Taegan isn’t super into drawing or art but these activities kept even her entertained. When she tired of arts and crafts we checked out the multi-level climbing play set and Crayola themed water tables. There’s also a dance floor and light show room.
We made it home the next day and finished off the week with our science experiments and some crafting/cooking activities that couldn’t be completed on the road. I was pretty tired out from all the travel and not feeling my best so we also took it easy by watching some fun holiday themed shows on television instead of attending the Irish parade downtown. Then we learned a couple steps of Irish dance from youtube videos and put on our own little parade. I struggle with wanting to experience everything and always running out of time but I feel like we did quite a bit to celebrate ol St. Patty this year!