Here at The Activity Mom we love any excuse to sneak in learning fun. Here are our favorite St. Patrick’s Day Activities for Preschoolers and older toddlers too. From St. Patrick’s Day crafts to rainbow preschool activities, young children will love these fun ideas in the month of March.
St. Patrick’s Day Crafts
Making a handprint rainbow is a creative sensory experience. This cute craft would be fun for the whole family! It is one of my favorite rainbow crafts because of the handprints and how simple it is to make.
Thumbprint Shamrocks are a great way to get creative and make a personalized art piece. Use your thumb and fingers to make green shamrocks on white paper or white shamrocks on green paper. This shamrock craft can be turned into a bookmark for a special gift or keepsake.
Rainbow Q-tip painting is so much fun and great fine motor work for preschoolers! Draw the lines and challenge your toddler or preschooler to stamp the matching colored paint along each line.
Use a green pepper to stamp shamrock prints like they did at Learn Play Imagine. Put green paint onto a paper plate and encourage little hands to dip the pepper into the paint and stamp it onto white paper to make a shamrock shape. Try stamping it onto black paper too or white paint onto green paper. Adding a little gold glitter to the paint will bring some extra magic to this four leaf clover craft.
Preschoolers will love to wear this leprechaun hat from Meaningful Mama. I love how simple paper plate crafts can be for kids and it’s a fun way to wear green!
Use a heart shape to make clovers. Cut out hearts of different sizes to make shamrocks of different sizes.
St. Patrick’s Day Activities for Preschoolers
Use paper plates to make a pot of gold craft. These pots of gold end up being purses or carrying treasure in hours of dramatic play. This craft is a fun game too! You can practice math skills like number recognition and counting. We made these pots of gold out of paper plates, glue and string. Then, I wrote a number on each of them and hung them around the house. My daughter took gold coins (cut out of construction paper) and delivered the correct number of coins to each pot of gold.
Use fine motor skills to make this beaded rainbow for St. Patrick’s Day. I put a block of foam out (Dollar Tree), as well as different colors of pony beads. They beaded the colors on the matching pipe cleaners and then bent them into a rainbow.
Building rainbows is great for visual discrimination and size sequencing. I cut circles in various colors of the rainbow. I laminated each piece and then put them in a bucket. Kids had to use their size determination skills and visual cues to build a rainbow on the tray! This activity is great for color recognition too.
We worked together to make this DIY rainbow scope from an empty coffee creamer bottle. Then my little leprechaun could see rainbows everywhere! He had a great time with this cute craft. He pretended to be on a search for the end of the rainbow and a pot of gold.
St. Patrick’s Day Scavenger Hunt Ideas
It’s the perfect time for a hunt. Go on a scavenger hunt for the color green.
Hide yellow pom poms around the room and go on a hunt for gold.
Write letters on plastic gold coins and challenge your preschooler to find them. Then, arrange them to spell their name.
St. Patrick’s Day Snacks
Turn your usual fun snacks into snacks for little leprechauns by adding green food coloring. Such a fun idea!
Make a rainbow fruit pizza together like they did at Joy Food Sunshine
Lucky Charms Popcorn from Thrifty Jinxy
St. Patrick’s day Science
Make a trap to catch a leprechaun. This is lots of fun for a family to plan and make together.
Create fizzing shamrocks like they did at Gift of Curiosity.
Sink the Pot Science Experiment from Little Bins for Little Hands
Pot of Gold Slime from Mom Dot Com
St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Bins
Create a sensory bin with colored pasta, pom poms, little shamrocks, and leprechaun gold. Kids of all ages enjoy this fun activity!
Make a pot of gold sensory bin from Mrs. Plemons Kindergarten. This one uses split peas as its base instead of dying rice.
Stir together goop from shaving cream and hide gold coins in it. What a neat sensory experience from Simple Play Ideas.
St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Soup from Next Comes L