We hit our first holiday week during Tot School and I couldn't have been more excited to go nuts with the St. Patty's day theme! It's no surprise that planning holiday lesson plans are just that much more fun! And in return, I think Nolan had a ton more fun, too!
We started Day 1 of St. Patrick's Day week off with the book Good Luck Bear, which was super cute and helped Nolan grasp the concept of what a Shamrock was.
We practiced our counting with the Shamrock counting printable (found here), and Nolan counted out the shamrocks with me as we placed green pom poms on each row.
Next up, we played the Shamrock Hunt game, where I hid 5 foam shamrocks throughout the living room for him to find. This was our first "Hide and Seek" game, so he was super excited about it and loved going in the other room to hide his eyes and "No Peeking!" as I hid the shamrocks all around. He had an absolute blast with this activity and we played multiple times this day and even throughout the week.
Our sensory bin was loaded with the same foam shamrocks that he covered and hid, as well as green cups to scoop and pour. It was a really fun day as our first introduction to St. Patty's Day!
On Day 2, we read one of our own St. Patty's Day books, St. Patrick's Day Countdown, and continued our counting theme by practicing our numbers and counting with the printable found here and using Lucky Charms marshmallows as our counters. Of course, this meant we got to eat them, which Nolan thought was amazing and hilarious!
We did a fun arts/crafts project for the theme, and made a pot of gold and rainbow of Nolan's handprints (idea found here). He typically enjoys making handprint art, so I was happy to see that he really liked this project and it came out so, so cute in the end! He helped glue down the pot of gold to start, and then we moved through the colors of the rainbow to paint his hands.
On our final St. Patty's Day of Tot School for the week, we read Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato, which was entirely too long and boring for Nolan to handle (it happens). We quickly moved on to our worksheet activity, which had him match up lower case letters on dot stickers to the lower case letters on the printable (found here). Nolan knows all of his upper case alphabet letters, so I thought this would be a good way to introduce lower case letters and help him begin to learn those. We struggled through some, but he did well and was bribed to finish with playing another round of the Shamrock Hunt game that he had enjoyed throughout the week!
After playing a million rounds of Shamrock Hunt, we moved on to our arts/craft of the day, which was creating a leprechaun using a fork to paint his beard (found here)! This was similar to our Brown Bear exercise we had done the week before, but Nolan wasn't super interested in it today and rushed through to finish. He did enjoy gluing the leprechaun's hat in the beginning, and thought it was funny that he gave him a tiny mustache directly on his nose! (Daddy also came home and thought we made Abraham Lincoln... so there's that).
Holidays for Tot School are super fun and I can't wait to celebrate another next week for Easter!!
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