St. Patrick’s Day
March 16, 2023
Book 1: Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring
Book 2: How to Catch a Leprechaun
Activity: Four Corners variation
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I was scheduled to visit my daughter’s preschool class on Tuesday, but we had a snow day here in Maine - one of what feels like many this March. As much as I love winter, I’m over it. Let’s move along, Mother Nature. When the roads were cleared, I finally made it in for our first ever (squee!) Story Session on Thursday.
To honor the longer days and slightly warmer temperatures our first story was Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring written and illustrated by Kenard Pak. Full of lyrical language and soft illustrations, this peaceful gem still offers plenty of fun in the form of dialogue and invitations for wiggly little ones to interact while listening: waving to the seasons, shivering in the cold, howling like a wolf, mimicking blooming flowers… Be on the lookout for the others in Pak’s beautiful series; kids love the familiarity even within the books’ variations as different seasons change.
For our next story, I picked a silly best-seller. One does not host a story time this close to St. Patrick’s Day without at least considering the wildly popular How to Catch a Leprechaun written by Adam Wallace and illustrated by Andy Elkerton. When I say wildly popular I mean wildly popular. When I pulled it out of my bag I was met with a chorus of “I know that book!” and “We have that book!" and “I read that book last night!”. Every kid was more than delighted to hear this one again. One of the hallmarks of a great picture book is re-readability and, with its bouncing rhymes and sneaky leprechaun hidden on each spread, this book has it. The formula works so well that this one also anchors a series; if you’re interested in collecting a menagerie of creatures real and imagined, Wallace has it covered.
By the time we were two stories deep late in the afternoon on a long day, these kiddos were ready to move! For today’s activity, I sprinkled a little metaphorical magic leprechaun dust and - tada! - re-branded the perennial classroom favorite, Four Corners into Four-leaf Clover. All it took was 4 green Dollar Store hula hoops, whipping up some number labels for each hoop and a leprechaun chant I dreamed up in the car on the way to school. The themed number labels worked great and gave us a chance to take a little counting practice detour while we set up the game. I challenge you to pen your own leprechaun chant, but if you want to borrow ours in the meantime it’s pretty straightforward:
Kids in the hoops/on clover leaves: “Sneaky little leprechaun, what do you say?”
Leprechauns: “We say clover leaf number ______!”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, pals!
PS: If you don’t already have hula hoops, note they are entirely unnecessary for the game. Just use green paper or painters tape or sections of a rug or bandanas or anything, really. This also would’ve worked well as an outside activity with a clover drawn in chalk if you, unlike me, live somewhere where spring weather starts on a reasonable date.
