Are you hunting for St. Patrick’s Day activities for kids to use in your classroom this holiday? No need to head to the end of the rainbow!
The teachers on the Teach Starter team went hunting for golden St. Patrick’s Day activities that pack in some curriculum standards for that perfect mix of fun and learning, and we dare say we might have caught a few leprechauns along the way!
Read on for leprechaun trap ideas, St. Patrick’s Day science activities, Irish games and more to bring the luck of the Irish into your school and your classroom!
How Do Schools Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?
Are you wondering if St. Patrick’s Day is OK to touch on in your classroom? After all, this a holiday that was named for a Catholic saint.
First, a little good news: These days most celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day are largely secular, and that includes public school celebrations.
Kids who attend Catholic schools may attend a special Mass in honor of Saint Patrick, but public school kids are probably just going to wear green, bust out some STEM skills building leprechaun traps, and maybe munch down on soda bread in the cafeteria.
Not quite sure if it’s OK to pull out some of these fun St. Patrick’s Day activities? When in doubt, check with your administration!
If the coast is clear, keep reading. Our teacher team has combined curriculum-aligned options with some that are just for fun, and you’ll find ideas for a variety of elementary grade levels.
Short on time? Head straight to the St. Patrick’s Day printables!
Fun St. Patrick’s Day Activities for Kids
Brainstorm a Simile Rainbow
Have each of your students draw and color a rainbow on a piece of blank paper. Colored pencils will work best for this activity!
In each arc of the rainbow, have your students write a simile in a darker color, comparing the colors with an object. For example, “As red as an apple. As orange as a fire. As yellow as a canary. As green as a shamrock,” etc.
Make a Cereal Rainbow
Photo courtesy of second-grade teacher Kendall Colell
This adorable play-with-your-food activity comes from second-grade teacher Kendal Colell. All you’ll need for this fun and easy craft are rainbow-colored loops cereal, pipe cleaners, marshmallows and paper plates.
To complete:
- Stick one side of a pipe cleaner into a marshmallow.
- Start threading the Fruit Loops onto the pipe cleaner.
- Attach the other marshmallow to the second side of the pipe cleaner.
- Gently bend the pipe cleaner into a rainbow shape until it’s able to stand on its own!
After creating, your students will have a blast eating their colorful creations or choose to take them home.
Cut Out Paper Shamrocks
Photo courtesy of children’s craft creators Andrea and Jantje of The KinderArt Club
How cute and festive are these rainbow shamrocks created by Andrea and Jantje or The KinderArt Club? We love the simplicity of this craft which can be a great fine motor activity for your young learners. Try creating your own using our template page from our Mosaic Clover Art Activity and print them out in various colors.
Write About Why You Feel Lucky (Free Download)
Add a social-emotional learning element to your writing centers with a chance to write about why they are lucky like a leprechaun.
Brainstorm a Lucky Poster
On a large piece of poster paper, draw the outline of a shamrock and write “I’m Lucky Because” at the top of the page. As a class, ask your students to think of ways they are lucky and write them within the lines of the shamrock.
You can also use this idea for kids to fill out on their own time. Stick the poster somewhere in the classroom (where students can reach) and encourage your kids to write reasons why they feel lucky. Examples could be “I’m lucky because I have a lot of friends” or “I’m lucky because I have a lot of good books to read at school.”
To expand on this activity, make a chart with three columns — I am Lucky Because I Can/Am/Have — and have your students give you examples to fill them all in.
Dress Up in Green
Photo courtesy of Florida kindergarten teacher Miss Cosides
Make sure you wear green so you don’t get pinched on St. Patrick’s day! Florida Kindergarten teacher Miss Cosides created this festive green outfit to wear at school, Lucky Charms and all! The day of green is on Sunday this year in 2024, so you can encourage a green dress-up day in the week leading up to St. Paddy’s Day.
Turn Some Classroom Snacks Green
Photo courtesy of former sped teacher Theresa of Sweet and Messy.
A bit of green food coloring can go a long way! Former sped teacher Theresa created this adorable green shamrock snack out of heart-shaped waffles! If you choose to host a St. Patrick’s Day party in the classroom, make sure you check with parents first for any food allergies and avoid certain snacks as necessary.
Other fun festive foods you can provide could include:
- Green Cupcakes
- Green Cookies
- Green Milk
- Green Popcorn
- Mint Oreos
- Green Jello
- Green Punch
- Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream (or use vanilla ice cream with green food coloring)
Play With Your Food St. Patrick’s Day Style
Photo courtesy of Canadian food creator Tifarah
If you’d like to have a fun food-themed activity or party but want to expand from the green theme, take some inspiration from Canadian food creator Tifarah and make St. Patrick’s Day elements using snacks!
For this adorable leprechaun, she used pears, tangerines, raspberries, blueberries and other small, kid-friendly items. See what your students can come up with and snap a picture before they munch away at their imaginative creations. Of course, be sure you check with parents for food allergies before providing snacks in your classroom.
Design a St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Bin
Instead of a pot of gold, create a fun sensory bin for students to dip their hands in! Here are some items you can collect from around the house or your local dollar store:
- Rice dyed green
- Small plastic cups or spoons
- Plastic gold coins
- Plastic green and gold necklaces
- Small foam shamrocks
- Lucky Charms or Fruit Loops cereal
Create Your Own Cotton Ball Rainbow
Photo courtesy of blogger Clare
Your students won’t be able to stop petting their fluffy rainbows after creating this adorable cotton ball arc by UK blogger Clare! Using pipettes and gluing techniques are perfect for your kids to practice their fine motor skills. Not to mention, they will get some practice learning the colors of the rainbow!
To create this craft, you will need:
- Cardboard
- Cotton Balls
- Watered Down Food Coloring
- Pipettes
- Glue Gun
- Small Plastic Tubes (for food coloring)
To create:
- Glue the cotton balls down onto the piece of cardboard in the shape of a rainbow. You may need a volunteer helper to assist your students while using the hot glue gun.
- Dilute food coloring with water in each plastic tube.
- Let your students decorate their rainbows using the pipettes and colors!
If you have fast finishers or want to go a step further, encourage your students to draw in a pot of gold on one side of the rainbow and/or clouds throughout the background for some depth and added color.
Set Up a St. Patrick’s Day Guess Jar
Will your students have the luck of the Irish and guess the correct number of items in the guessing jar? Come up with a clever prize for the winner such as chocolate gold coins or the entire jar of goodies! Here are some ideas to fill your jar:
- Chocolate gold coins
- Lucky Charms cereal
- Fruit Loops cereal
- Rainbow Skittles
- Green M&Ms
- Green Hershey’s Kisses
- Rainbow-colored jelly beans
- Mini marshmallows
Write Limericks in ELA
You can’t study Irish tradition without a lesson on the popular Irish poem style — limericks! While the exact origins of this silly poetry form are unknown, most experts attribute it to an old Irish song, which makes it a perfectly Irish way to mark the holiday.
Just five lines long with a simple rhyme scheme — AABBA (the first, second, and fifth lines rhyme with each other, and the third and fourth lines rhyme with each other) — these poems are a fun challenge for upper elementary students in your ELA class.
Practice Irish Step Dancing
This is one of our favorite brain breaks to use around St. Patrick’s Day!
Pull up videos of professional Irish step dancers on YouTube to watch as a class — we are big fans of clips from Riverdance — then practice some of the steps together. You’ll get your students out of their seats to get their wiggles out, and they’ll learn a thing or two about Irish culture!
It’s worth noting that Irish step dancing is quite difficult, so there will be a lot of laughter, but students may get frustrated as they cannot easily copy the steps. Why not use this as a chance to discuss perseverance and teamwork?
Make Rainbow Soap Foam in Science Class
We may associate rainbows with St. Patrick’s Day because leprechauns find pots of gold at the other end, but there’s a lot more to this phenomenon that’s worth exploring in the classroom— from how it can be rainy and sunny at the same time to how the light spectrum works.
Exploring the rainbow through the lens of St. Patrick’s Day can make an already fun subject more fun, and making rainbow soap foam cranks up the excitement — and the learning. There may not be a pot of gold at the end of this science experiment, but there is an investigation into how gas bubbles are trapped in liquids and solids!
Teaching younger students? Rainbow foam makes for a super sensory experience for St. Patrick’s Day.
Find out how to make your own rainbow foam recipe with just three ingredients.
Start Clover Seeds
Do you like to do some spring planting with your class to teach them about all the things that seedlings need to grow? Skip the bean sprouts this year, and substitute clover seed! Not only is this activity perfectly themed to St. Patrick’s Day — everyone wants to find that lucky 4-leafed clover — but planting clover as a class opens up discussions about its use in feeding livestock, its release of nitrogen into the air to help other plants and plenty more science lessons.
Clover is also incredibly easy to grow from seed, meaning your class is almost guaranteed to see the fruits of their labor. Here are the (seriously simple) instructions.
Supplies:
- Clover seeds
- Potting soil
- A container with drainage holes (why not make your own with newspaper?
How to Plant Clover
- Have your students fill the container with soil and make little divots for the seeds to sown in.
- Sprinkle the clover seeds into the soil, and gently press them down.
- Remind your students to water the seeds regularly, but not to drown them. It’s important to keep the soil moist, but not soaking wet. You might want to assign one of your classroom helpers this job.
- Now comes the waiting game! The clover seeds should start to sprout within a week or two. Encourage your class to keep an eye on their new little sprouts and cheer them on as they grow taller and stronger.
- Once the clover has grown a few inches tall, the kids can even have some fun trimming it down with scissors and watching it grow back even stronger. Who knew gardening could be such a cut-and-clover operation?
Sink Into St. Paddy’s Synonyms
Speaking of clover, this fun St. Paddy’s synonyms activity puts an ELA spin on the lucky plant with a craft template designed to help your students build their vocabulary skills. Notice the yellow discs on the green leaves? They’re gold coins, of course. Let’s hope the leprechaun doesn’t realize they’ve gone missing …
Decorate With Rainbow Names
Do you like to decorate your classroom door or hallway display board for holidays with your student names? These little rainbows are perfect for St. Patrick’s Day and also extend into spring — so you get more life out of them!
Need a cloud template to make it easier? We’ve got you!
Complete a Rainbow Watercolor Pot of Gold Art Activity
Do you need a St. Patrick’s Day activity for art class? How about teaching your little leprechauns to create their own pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
You will need:
- Watercolor painting equipment
- Black cardstock for your pots
- Gold paper to make gold coins
- Glue
- Scissors
This watercolor rainbow will brighten any classroom, but watch out…the leprechauns may be back to make mischief if they find out their gold is on display!
Build Leprechaun Traps
Build on the magic of the leprechaun to develop students’ engineering skills by creating leprechaun traps designed to capture this mischievous St. Patrick’s Day icon. This hands-on STEM activity can be accompanied by a reading of the fun book How to Catch a Leprechaun by Adam Wallace and extend to students practicing their procedural writing by writing “how to” tutorials on how their traps will work to ensure they return to the classroom to find a magical creature has been captured!
Print the Rainbow
Print the rainbow using nothing but your hands! After collecting paint in all the colors of the rainbow, have your students paint each finger with a different color and press their hand firmly down on a white piece of paper.
When the paint dries, have each student draw a black pot of gold under the hand to make it look like the rainbow is bursting from it. You can go a step further and have them glue down gold sequins to look like gold coins!
Learn About Water Movement With Rainbows
Yup, more rainbows. But we promised curriculum, and this offers plenty of learning. Another fun STEM activity for St. Patrick’s Day, the ever-popular walking water experiment introduces kids to the concept of capillary action but with a rainbow twist!
Encourage your kids to make predictions about what they think will happen when you fill jars with water and food coloring, then drop in paper towels that link the jars together.
Get the full details on this experiment plus a video!
Design Rainbow Bridges
We’ve got just one more rainbow activity! Stock up on colorful straws from the dollar store, and your students can tackle bridge-making to learn about engineering for St. Patrick’s Day. Using the straws, groups of students can make rainbow-colored bridges between desks that will hold up a book — or several!
Make Shamrock Mosaics
Work on patterns and help younger students build their shape recognition with a fun St. Patrick’s Day mosaic activity featuring one of the holiday’s best-known symbols: The shamrock. You can also use the Mosaic Clover Art Activity to complement your students’ understanding of the symbolism behind St Patrick’s Day.
Create a St Patrick’s Day Word Search
We’ve got a word search themed around all things St. Patrick and Ireland ready-made for your class, but if you haven’t used our Create Your Own Word Search Widget, you’re missing out! This is the perfect widget for putting a fun spin on learning St. Patrick’s Day vocabulary.
Load your vocabulary words into the word search generator, and you’re ready to go! Since you’re steering the ship, you can create a vocabulary search that’s right for your grade level and easily add differentiated versions for your various learners too!
St. Patrick’s Day Bulletin Board Ideas
Try some of these fun ideas to create a festive St. Paddy’s Day vibe in the classroom!
Little Leprechauns
All you’ll need for this bulletin board idea are photos of your students and colored construction paper! Have each student cut out small leprechaun hats (using rectangles and squares) and their faces from each photo. Have students glue the hats to the top of their heads creating a classroom band of mischievous leprechauns!
You can create a header title such as “Leprechauns Welcome” or “One Lucky Teacher” at the top.
Pot of Gold
Create a giant rainbow covering your bulletin board in colored construction paper and staple or glue the title “If I Had a Pot of Gold, I Would…” at the top.
Have each student write what they would do with a pot of gold on a small piece of white paper and glue it to a small black cutout of a pot. To complete the look, glue on gold sequins at the top to look like gold coins (or glitter if you so dare!).
Other gold-related bulletin board themes could include:
- Our Class is as Good as Gold/Our Writing is as Good as Gold, etc.
- You Are Worth More Than Gold
- Kindness is Golden
- You Are a Pot of Gold
Rainbow of Possibilities
Bring the colors inside the classroom walls with our Rainbow of Possibilities Bulletin Board Bundle. These cute illustrations and cheerful colors are sure to brighten your learning space.
Cutest Clovers in the Patch
Using our Mosaic Clover Art Activity template and photos of each of your students, have your students glue a photo of their face within the green-filled clover for a bright and springy bulletin board display. The title “Cutest Clovers in the Patch” is sure to impress other staff members and students in your school!
Lucky to Have You Here
If you want to create a simple yet welcoming bulletin board display, consider “Lucky to Have You Here” with St. Patrick’s Day elements surrounding the letters. These could include cutouts of a pot of gold, the Lucky Charms cereal, horseshoes, gold coins and other objects.
Other lucky-themed bulletin board titles could include:
- Luck Is All Around
- Lucky Vibes
- In Our Lucky Era
- This Class is Full of Lucky Charms
- Learning With My Lucky Charms
- One Lucky Teacher
- One Lucky Class
- The Luckiest Little Leprechauns
- Lucky Little Learners
Comments