March is a special month – within the span of a week my brother AND my father have their birthdays. I will warn  you now… March was photo heavy!! And VERY delayed… but better late than forgetting all about the blog and giving up on it… right?

Our trend of almost every evening at the YMCA has continued. I think we are really taking full advantage of our membership right now.

Ken and I spent more than a few weekends with an evening at the indoor soccer games.

Some of those nights Aidan and Alex joined our kids to avoid having to go watch.

We spent some fun time with the Schwartz family.

Of course there was plenty of school going on.

We had a tiny bit of snow to enjoy.

We had a bit of a fashion show month.

The completions in class just keep on coming.

And I found time for some baking.

Don’t forget about St. Patrick’s Day!

Or our monthly Pizza Hut.

The sunroom has finally warmed, with the help of the new portable fireplace and a tidy room we have really been enjoying the space.

We finished up a redecorate on Emanuel’s room!

We also put up improved clothing rods for the girls!

I got in lots of crocheting time.

And found a yarn that reminded me of a famous painting.

Snuck in a cross stitch pattern – a birthday gift for my mom!

And after making them at Cluby, Trinity helped me make some knotted blankets for our sunroom chairs.

Spent some time at church.

It was great to spend time with friends who are family.

And just straight out family! 

Ken and I snuck out for our own time together too.

All while we played and learned and kept ourselves busy!

 

 

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 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!

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

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…

Of course we set our leprechaun trap!

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!

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.

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.

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!