So with the simplicity of a single entry for all the Platypus and Dr. Seuss resources I figure why not continue the trend? Even if it is not overly helpful to the rest of the world it means I can come back next year and either avoid repeats or recover the treasures with ease. So here goes:

Books:

• Shannon and the World’s Tallest Leprechaun by Sean Callahan
• St. Patrick’s Day by Mari C. Schuh
• The St. Patrick’s Day Shillelagh by Janet Nolan (you can find a clear dfinition and examples of some Shillelaghs HERE and pronounciation HERE.)
• Lindsay the Luck Fairy from the Rainbow Magic series by Daisy Meadows
• A Fine St. Patrick’s Day by Susan Wojciechowski
• St. Patrick’s Day by Anne Rockwell
• St. Patrick’s Day by Gail Gibbons
• Patrick Patron Saint of Ireland by Tomie dePaola
• Fiona’s Luck by Teresa Bateman
• It’s St. Patrick’s Day, Dear Dragon by Margaret Hillert
• Sally Go Round the Stars by Sarah Webb and Claire Ranson (Favourite Rhymes from an Irish Childhood)
• Julie Andrews’ Treasury for all Seasons (Poems and Songs to Celebrate the Year) selected by Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton
• Saint Patrick and the Peddler by Margaret Hodges (we did not pick this book up until AFTER our unit was done, but it was an amazing story with beautiful pictures)

Worksheets

• A fun leprechaun and pot of gold dot to dot HERE.
• St. Patrick’s Day themed addition, where you have to choose the two numbers out of 4 that make the sum HERE.
• St. Patrick the person worksheet HERE.
• Christian St. Patrick’s Day worksheets and crafts HERE.
• St. Patrick’s Day word problems (math) HERE.
• Story pages HERE.
• Word search with fun facts HERE.
• Numbers 1-17 dot to dot HERE.
• Rainbow maze HERE.

Crafts

• Templates for pots and shamrocks HERE.
• St. Patrick’s Day Man craft HERE.
• Leprechaun paperdolls HERE.
• Leaping Leprechaun craft HERE.
• Fingerprint Pot ‘O Gold with printable template HERE.
• How to Draw a Pot of Gold HERE.
• Maybe not for the kids, but for the crochet whizz… a Leprechaun hat thanks to CrochetSpot HERE.
• Shamrock Trinity Craft with a crash course on making something look plaid HERE.
• Fuse beads/Perler beads patterns HERE.
• Handprint rainbow HERE.
• Make a leprechaun trap HERE. We used coloured instead of plain sticks… they were cheaper!!

General Printables

• St. Patrick’s Day Fun Facts HERE.
• Irish Dancer colouring page. Trinity cut her flag away to just save the dancer HERE.
• Irish flag HERE.
• Irish bookmarks HERE.
• Little book of Irish slang HERE.
• Map of Ireland HERE.
• Irish American founding fathers (Irish men who were involved in the signing of the constitution, information and word scramble) HERE.
• The Ghillie Girls Irish dancers. We needed something all the kids could get in on and with multiple dancers this was perfect HERE.
• Design an Irish Dancer. The picture is the top left one of the page list HERE. Trinity loved this one, she made herself into a dancer!
• Colour an Irish Harp HERE.
• Colour an Irish Princess HERE.
• Colour a picture all about Hurling a sport rather specific to Ireland HERE.
• Fun themed labels for gifts by A Cupcake for the Teacher HERE.
• Celtic Mandala HERE.

Of course we had to scour youTube for some videos to fit our theme! Here is a selection! Discover Ireland Long Version by Tourism Ireland…

Riverdance for some beautiful Irish dancing… AND a Facebook link HERE of a friend and her troupe as they warm up. Sadly the music playing is live and what they were practicing to was canned music we can’t hear but still… beautiful.

Our focus also fell on Irish instruments… the Bodhran…

The Uillean…

The tin whistle…

and the Celtic Harp…

We only watched the first in the series but there are THREE videos on Hurling to watch by Cokane1888 on youTube.

For all resource links please check out the entry “Saint Patrick’s Day Resources“.

March 15-17

Friday marked the end of our St. Patrick’s Day unit with a video (one of 3 in a series though interest did not hold for all 3 this year) on Hurling, a popular sport in Ireland.

I am so proud of the boys where BOTH managed 100% on their spelling tests! Clean slate on Monday with all new words is always a good thing.

Emanuel used two wonderful sets of dinosaur heads as his Friday colouring pages. Both by Zakafreakarama. HERE and HERE. We are so glad we came upon this artist on deviantArt. His works is so clean!

We finished our chapter book – Lindsay the Luck Fairy… AND did copy work from the Julie Andrews poetry book.

We did a layered book with this one

With our copy work.

We had all that snow coming down so the twins decided they must work on building something grander than the neighbour kids… it is amazing how sticky the snow was!

Busy Boys

We finally found time for our finger painting craft. Thanks to Art for Kids!

We are so not dirty hands people other than in dirt so this was a stretch, but fun

We had to make orange too, so had a great conversation about colour mixing.

Completed

Saturday was an at home day, after a bunch of snow coming down and the weather warming and cooling so much it was just too icy to go places or have people over. With only 2 weekends left before Nana and Baba return we were hoping we could get in some more visiting. While people do come over here when Ken’s parents are here, it is nice to have that feeling of just us and friends once in a while. The kids are excited that they will be home soon though!

We finished up our special poster for St. Patrick’s Day. I think we did  rather good job! Assembly is half the fun and we had stickers to add and markers to write words. Now we move onto Easter and a lapbook…

We added a few more words after this photo but a poster to be proud of!

Of course we set our leprechaun trap!

Trap is set

That brings us to St. Patrick’s Day with our sneaky Leprechaun being a CANADIAN one! It left our dear ones quarters AND a Coffee Crisp bar!

So close

I lucked out and we found 3 green shirts of varying shades… add to that two that we picked up for the girls and we had some rather spiffy looking children. Trinity even wore her green headband. And yours truly a green shirt. We were VERY festive.

All in Green (Zander left)

Cheese

Ken actually spoiled them with daddy time and they all played together on Minecraft. We have been trying more and more to make it so Ken is not just around morning and bedtime and seeing just the disciplinarian part of stuff. This working out of home has definitely been an adjustment.

Supper with a touch of green

And with that we have covered St. Patrick’s Day, except for a follow up on Monday and definitely had some quality family time! I, of course, will follow this post with the resource post AND link all the pages back to it like I have other. I hope these pages come in handy to someone!

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day

Well there are some days where blogging just does not appeal and yesterday was one of them. I want to thank my friend Elaine for coming up with the idea of Wordless Wednesday… it gave me the chance to share one of my favourite spontaneous and recent shots of Echo. AND she was in pink in honour of the anti-bullying day to boot! So I hope everyone enjoyed the cuteness (I have to point out that the little hair thing in her hair – felt bow – all me!).

That is not to say that yesterday had us at a standstill! Far from it… St. Patrick’s day is just over a week away and the worksheets, videos and craft ideas keep coming. If you are interested in the bulk of the worksheets I have been talking about here you can check them out in my collection titled St. Patrick’s Day on Education.com. I do love this site as the resources are free and any and all issues I have had with a worksheet or information have been followed up SUPER quickly. As usual I am going by my old gaming name – Ayjah if you are trying to find me, though I HAVE reviewed MOST of the worksheets I used which also pops up on Facebook. 

I made the kids a special poster for St. Patrick’s Day to welcome people. You can get all the info for that HEREfrom the Original Kids Crafts site. 

A Hundred Thousand Welcomes

While watching the Discover Ireland series on YouTube we came across a sports segment that had an unknown sport with a ball and stick involved… and it was definitely NOT hockey, so of course we had to look it up! And found out all about something called HURLING! Seriously! 

I don’t know that we will attempt to play above game when it warms up but they really did enjoy learning about something new. You can find a link to what seems to be an official kids’ club colouring pages HERE. And HERE is the Wiki info. I had one of the twins colour the Hurling colouring page and the other Soccer as they are both major sports in the Republic of Ireland. And then we wrote interesting things about each sport on the back of the coloured sheets to go into our St. Patrick’s Day File. I am seriously thinking about doing their next year in a Notebooking format! They just make too many interesting things! 

I shrank down the template for this craft project as we didn’t have full sheets of green foam, and substituted one sheet of yellow and one of brown for two of them (note to self, need MORE green foam!)… we have rainbow cord (thank you whoever gifted that to us we LOVE IT!) and Ken made me up a simple 4 leaf clover template to use as decoration. I did Trinity’s sewing portion for her and the boys cut her pieces but she had fun being involved in it. You can find the original instructions HERE.

Emanuel at work, he did it ALL himself

Four completed bags

Our little Echo is quickly becoming a rough and tumble girl and has the bruises to prove it! Don’t ask me HOW she got this one, but what I THOUGHT was marker on her cheek smudged mostly off seems to be a bruise (maybe on one of her death defying climbs onto Trinity or Emanuel’s beds???)… I struggle between wanting to wrap her up in cotton and cheering on her adventurous spirit! Size is most certainly NOT slowing her down! She even tried to climb out of the tub to Daddy last night… he firmly told her no and sat her back down but she JUST is tall enough to get that foot up there on the side! 

I have spent MORE time on the WIP… features and fine details are starting to pop out which I have to admit is spurring on my interest greatly! Maybe I WILL get it done and perhaps by June! It will depend on other projects of course… and my focus but I guess if I keep the silly thing in my face more it will get worked on more! 

So February has come to a close… we survived the short month and while the van is NOT fixed (part still on its way grr) and some things are still in the works other issues have been solved! AND we have managed to get out some fun events as well! We have learned about the Inuits… Ireland and St. Patrick’s Day, celebrated Valentine’s Day AND Chinese New Year AND 3 birthdays… Now we face March. My brother and my Father’s birthdays are in March… and this year so is Echo’s surgery. I think that is going to weigh heavy on all our minds for the next 20 or so days. I would like to ask that everything think positive thoughts or say a prayer for Echo as we creep up to her date. We want her to be as healthy as possible beforehand and the surgery to go through without complications. 

Tomorrow the kids and I have to start our paper mache project… and there is a felt project Ken and I are working on altering to make it easier on little fingers. So I will have MORE crafts to share!

Rough and tumble + overalls = CUTE!!!