A Wee Bit of St. Paddy's Fun!

Can it be true?  Am I finally blogging twice within a week?  Hold the applause.  I'm applauding myself enough as it is!  Hopefully it will become an oddity when I don't blog soon enough but, until then, I'll continue to celebrate my efforts of blogging more often!

Today we had a BLAST celebrating St. Paddy's day in first grade!  This was by far the most fun St. Paddy's I've had in my four years teaching and by far the most successful day yet!  It's always a good day when you get several, "You're the best teacher ever" comments, am I right?!

This morning, we went to our reading room and when we got back, we read a St. Patrick's Day story.  And then....at the end of the story...DUN DUN DUN....a mysterious piece of paper dropped out!  BUT HOW COULD THAT BE POSSIBLE?! We just had this book on display and kids had just read it only twenty minutes prior.  I mean, if we're considering all plausible options, the only one that makes any sense at all is that a leprechaun came and put it there while we were gone!

.........duh.

 

We discovered that there were shamrock clues to a super top secret code underneath some of our chairs!  Amidst the leisurely stroll MAD DASH back to our seats to try and find the clues, I had only one kiddo crying in fear of the leprechaun so....that was pretty traumatic.  Luckily, we were able to build that bridge and get over it relatively quickly...:)

We used the mystery code sheet from Mrs. Miner's Monkey Business' Lucky Leprechaun pack, but I substituted my own shamrock clues.  We searched and searched and walked around the room, tirelessly filling out our secret codes and solving the puzzle

 

The finished puzzle read, "The ingredients needed for Lucky Leprechaun juice are hiding under Miss D'Andrea's desk!"  Hilariously, most of the kids didn't fill in the word "desk" until the very end and were under the impression that all of the ingredients were.......under me.  After spinning around more than one time and removing my cardigan, we were able to comprehend that the ingredients were not, in fact, under me.  But then we filled in the missing word.

Cue the screams.  

Luckily I was able to herd the crowd down to the carpet so that I wouldn't get trampled en route to my desk.  Low and behold, the ingredients were there!  Of course, I was shocked (!), surprised (!), and a little scared (!) that a leprechaun had somehow gotten under my desk!  How could it be?

We found a whole batch of ingredients hidden under there!

 But what were they?  Were they dangerous?  Was the leprechaun trying to trick us all into becoming leprechauns too?  Ahh, the many questions involved in an innocent little combination of ingredients covered conveniently with construction paper you can find in my cabinets...

So, we mixed them up.  We "oooooed" and "ahhhhed".  We asked if Miss D'Andrea could have the first sip so that we could all see if she turned into a leprechaun before we drank it.  How sweet.

Rest assured, I didn't turn into a leprechaun.  Although, as one of my little girls so nicely pointed out my, "eyes were starting to have green underneath them."  Nope, nope, that's just my eyeliner running.  LET ME LIVE MY LIFE!  And despite the occasional fear, we were all able to take at least a sip of the lucky juice (after all, we didn't want to be the one who made the magic go away!)

I put together this little poem to practice one of our CCSS focus skills: "I can identify words in a text that describe feelings and senses."  We didn't have time to get to it, so I plan on using it for a mini-lesson this week when we reflect back on our St. Paddy's Day!  I figured I'd attached it here just in case anyone still wants to use some leprechaun-themed activities throughout the week!  Click HERE to get the freebie!

 

After drinking our lucky juice, we wrapped up our non-standard units of measurement unit by using centimeter cubes to measure St. Patrick's Day pictures I snagged from Rowdy in Room 300

Much to my surprise, during indoor recess, my kiddos created quite the leprechaun trap using some of our extra lucky juice and straws.  Of course, it was complete with pseudo-gold and rainbows!  Unfortunately, I didn't know about the trap the leprechaun didn't visit during lunchtime, so the trap remained until it was time for art.

After lunch, when the kids saw that the leprechaun didn't come back, we had some doubters!  But, ALAS, the MAGIC SHRINKING LEPRECHAUN HAT will prove any doubters wrong!  Just tell the kids a story your mom supposedly told you a long time ago about how leprechauns can shrink styrofoam cups into leprechaun hats.  Then, decorate a styrofoam cup....

Leave the room for art, come back and.....

SURPRISE!  THE LEPRECHAUN DOES EXIST!! He shrank all of our cups into hats while we were at art!  (Note: putting styrofoam cups in the oven at 250 degrees for 3 minutes does wonders :))  He even drank all of the juice from our trap and left gold (Rolos because gold coins were no where to be found in Ireland, obviously)!  That sneaky little guy!  

What a nice and friendly leprechaun and what an AWESOME day in first grade!  Here's hoping the craziness goes down by Wednesday.  And here's to being incredibly thankful that tomorrow happens to be a staff in-service day that won't be bombarded by never-ending leprechaun hunts...

If you've gotten this far in my post, I commend you! I hope you sleepy as soundly tonight as I'm sure I will!