How to Incorporate St. Patrick's Day Into Lesson Plans

It can be hard to find the delicate balance of celebrating a holiday in the classroom and still ensuring that your students are gaining knowledge. This St. Patrick's Day, instead of making shamrock art projects and having a parade of green-wearing children, find some educational ways to incorporate St. Patrick's Day into your lesson plans.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Lucky Charms cereal
• Water
• Green food coloring
• White carnations
• Irish folk tales
• Various supplies to make simple machines

1. Incorporate the holiday into your math lesson by sorting and graphing Lucky Charms. Provide each child with a handful of the cereal and ask them to sort it into groups and graph the lucky results. With older students, teach a lesson about probability by placing a specific number of each magically delicious charm into a paper bag and helping them to calculate the odds of pulling one of them out of the bag.
2. Teach students about the root system of flowers with carnation science. Fill a vase halfway with water and place 15 to 20 drops of green food coloring in the water. Place a few white carnations in the vase at the beginning of the day and check on them before the day's end. The flower will have turned green, allowing you to teach students about how flowers gain nutrients through the stem.
3. Compare and contrast Irish folk tales. Choose a few similar tales to read to the class. After you've read them, lead a discussion about what elements are common to the stories and which ones differ. Have the students help you make a Venn diagram to chart the results.
4. Use St. Patrick's Day writing prompts during language arts time. Provide students with story starters like "If I had a pot of gold..." or "Yesterday I caught a leprechaun. You wouldn't believe how I did it." Have them write stories and share them with the class.
5. Make a KWL (Know, Want to Know, Learned) chart about leprechauns. Divide a large piece of paper into t3 columns. In the first column list all the things the class knows about leprechauns, in the second all the things they would like to know. Then have the students do some leprechaun research and come back to complete the third column with all the new things they learned.
6. Teach a lesson about simple machines. After learning about levers, inclined planes, wheels and axles, screws, wedges and pulleys, provide your students with scrap supplies with which they can make these machines. Have them create leprechaun traps in which they must incorporate their newfound knowledge.