Every March, St. Patrick’s Day makes for a day of fun that teaches too! We are going to have so much fun learning and playing with leprechauns. Here’s how our day begins with first grade St. Patrick’s Day activities that are fun and linked directly to learning standards.

1.

First off, we are going to talk about prepositions. Our cute leprechaun will teach, review and informally assess in a PowerPoint slideshow. Not only that, I slipped in some academic vocabulary, “locate” and “determine”!

2.

Next, I showed students with a printable leprechaun “puppet” how he can position himself around a pot of gold. I took a small, clean green-tinted soda bottle (small) and cut off the bottom and taped the pot to the front of it; this helped show the preposition “inside”.

3.

Then, I gave students their own black line leprechaun and pot of gold to color, cut and glue on construction paper (9×12 inches), along with a sentence frame. They were able to demonstrated their own preposition this way, and I put it up on our hallway bulletin board.

Make sure to always check your students’ spelling! It helps you to enjoy first grade St. Patrick’s Day activities too.

4.

We will be playing a spinner game to review and determine the best preposition for our sentences. It just wouldn’t make sense for us to write, “The leprechaun is between the tree”, unless we make “tree” plural. The sentence frames on our recording sheet will keep us focused.

5.

For math, we are going to read the clues from the slideshow (that’s in PowerPoint) and color in our hundred chart to create a mystery picture. It’s important to have a self-checking piece after each clue for differentiation and self-monitoring. Also, I encourage the students to read the clues aloud, which helps my sweet and lows.

This slideshow will last at from 15-18 minutes, because it is timed! That means that I can do some prep, grade, assess, or whatever I need to do during this time! I think of this activity as a whole group math center. Can you tell what we will be making? There is a clue and final picture at the end for students to check and correct their work.

6.

The math center we play is a very important standard for first grade: making ten. We match the coins in the ten frames on the pots of gold to find the two numbers to add and make ten. To differentiate, we first play with right sides up to match. Players take turns trying to match two cards to make a ten and if correct they keep those cards. When they are getting good at this game, we play right-sides down. We can’t play this game too much in first grade, and it gets them ready for adding double-digits!

If you would like to get more details on these resources for first grade St. Patrick’s Day activities, you can find more about them by clicking here, or on the images below.