Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Okay, so this has been one of the MOST exhausting weeks of the year.  I blame it on a lack of sleep, but there are probably other factors like my hour and 1/2 work out every single day!  :o)  Anyway, my plan was to post my St. Patrick's Day projects before the actual day to share my ideas with the 2 other teachers out there reading my blog.  Obviously this did not happen.  So now I get to re-cap our exhausting day!


I have taught first grade in years past, and St. Patrick's Day, although exciting, was not very revved up.  Kindergarten and Leprechauns are not the same match as first grade and Leprechauns.  Wow!

Our class read this book last week:

It is a very cute book about two little children getting ready for St. P's Day.  They make cool looking leprechaun traps out of homemade items and end up getting tricked by the leprechaun that comes.  We do an "At Home Project" each month, and this month it was our leprechaun traps.  I was amazed, blown away, taken back, WOW'ed by our creations!  Check them out:

The one on the left is a shoe box designed and created by herself.  The one on the right is a real mouse trap with paint and coins glued inside.

This one has a slide at the top of the ladder  :o)

Can you imagine if you were a leprechaun??  I don't know where I'd go first!  :o)

     

Look closely at this one: the cup actually comes down if you move the pot of gold!

So the traps had been trickling in since Monday, and I think they are responsible for the mayhem that followed on Thursday.

We left the room for recess on St. P's Day but made sure our traps were set.  I did not get pictures of our room after the leprechaun came, but I "accidentally" left out green paint and he danced in it which made footprints wherever he went after that.  He left green footprints on all of the traps and all over the tables!

The leprechaun also left us doughnuts with green and white sprinkles, a St. P's Day pencil, and foamie shamrocks all over our room.  He gave us a card that said what wonderful traps we had made.  He took all of our bookbags and spread them throughout the room.  He also took a green Expo marker and wrote "hahaha, hehehe" all over our whiteboards.  Apparently he likes Pandora.com, because bagpipe music was blaring from the computer when we got back to the room.

Here is our leprechaun decoration we made (it's inspired by Deanna Jump's leprechaun glyph...we just did the head instead of the whole body)

Here's our silly Mr. Grinch ready for St. P's Day!

This was our art project for the week thanks to my teammate Kathy.  Her class made theirs last week and they were so darn cute!

Okay, so let me just say that St. P's Day in our classroom was the longest, noisiest day this whole year.  I don't know why!!!  But this kindergarten teacher was exhausted at the end of the day.  I even told my assistant that I didn't want to hear the word leprechaun for a full 365 days!!  :o)  But luckily we survived, and the students had a blast.  As long as they had fun, it was a success in my book.  Maybe the more exhausted I am, the better job we did.  Maybe I can look at it that way.  Anyway, I saw so many great ideas about St. P's Day and I'm glad that there are so many other teachers as excited about it as me!