Easy St. Patrick’s Day Literacy Activities
Gather your mischievous little leprechauns for some festive fun this March! Our favorite St. Patrick’s Day literacy activities for preschoolers will have little ones engaging, discovering and learning in no time – perfect to add excitement to any classroom or home. So get ready to explore the luck of the Irish with these easy prep activities and add to your preschool lesson plans.
Students Will Love These St. Patrick’s Day Literacy Activities
These St. Patrick’s Day activities for preschoolers are awesome for kindergarten, too! Hands-on letter activities are the best way to play and learn the alphabet all in one. Included in this post are five St. Patrick’s Day literacy activities to add to your preschool centers or your circle time activities.
FAQ About Teaching St. Patrick’s Day to Preschoolers
What is the point of St. Patrick’s Day anyway? Is that what you’re thinking? Let me give you a little background that will help make this holiday even more special for your preschoolers.
For preschoolers, St. Patrick’s Day is mostly a silly holiday that celebrates the color green, rainbows, pots of gold, and mischievous leprechauns.
St. Patrick’s Day is on March 17th and has become the day when people around the world celebrate Irish culture. Saint Patrick is the Catholic patron saint of Ireland and often associated with icons of Ireland such as the shamrock and the color green.
The leprechaun is a small Irish fairy who dresses like a shoemaker. Despite recent commercialism, leprechauns are unfriendly little men who live alone in the forest. There are no female leprechauns. They spend their time making shoes and guarding their gold treasures. If you catch a leprechaun, he’ll be forced to tell you where he hides his pots of gold.
Many might think that Ireland is associated with the color green because of its lush, vibrant, green, grassy hills…but really the color green has more to do with politics than anything. The colors of the Irish flag are green, white, and orange; the green symbolizes Irish nationalism, the orange symbolizes the Orangemen of the north, and the white symbolizes peace. [source]
Get Printable St. Patrick’s Day Preschool Centers
Looking for something to help teach your preschoolers about rainbows, leprechauns and gold coins, as well as letters and numbers?! This St. Patrick’s Day Activity Pack includes six super fun activities and multiple variations of each!
St. Patrick’s Day Reading Activities for Kindergarten and Preschool
The preschool activities for St. Patrick’s Day that are featured in this post will cover a variety of letter identification and phonological awareness activities. This way you have a wide range of activities to teach your preschoolers.
Please note that this post includes hands-on activities that you can make with items from the dollar store, but it has also been updated to include a printable for one of the activities.
Shamrock Letter Matching
Using a permanent marker and some foam shamrocks from a dollar store, write the lowercase alphabet on the shamrocks, one letter per leaf curve. Then write the uppercase letters on flat floral rocks, which also can be found at most dollar stores. (I wrote them on the flat part of the rock, which meant I had to write them backwards.) Lay out the shamrocks and rocks and invite your child to match the uppercase rocks with the lowercase letters on the shamrocks.
Don’t forget that this activity has been updated to include a free printable!
This alphabet matching printable also includes letter cards that can be used if you don’t have flat floral pebbles on hand.
***Remember to grab your free printable at the end of this post.***
Initial Sound Circle Seek
Using a permanent marker, write the letters of the alphabet on foam shamrocks (carried at most dollar stores). Arrange them in alphabetical order in a large circle on the floor and invite your preschooler to sit in the middle. Say a letter sound and invite your preschooler to spin around until they find the corresponding letter.
If the entire alphabet is too much for your preschooler, then select just a handful of letters to work on. Although, fewer letters means that your preschooler won’t be able to sit in the circle, and spinning on your bum is half the fun!
Alternatively, you can place the shamrocks in a line in alphabetical order and have your preschooler hop to the corresponding letter. Either way, your preschooler gets some gross motor work in.
Related Reading
St. Patrick’s Day Letter Formation
Print off these letter formation mats and place them inside a dry erase pouch. I love these pouches because they clean off easier than laminated sheets and they are less expensive, too! Grab some St. Patrick’s Day themed counters and have your preschooler form the letter. I like this gold acrylic table scatter.
Alternatively, you can also use these as letter playdough mats. Form the letter with playdough and then add the gold gems. We love to use this sparkly gold playdough recipe for these mats.
Pots of Letter Matching
Do you have some plastic mini black cauldrons? They are a must for St. Patrick’s Day! Use a silver permanent marker to write a letter of the alphabet on each cauldron. Then set out a set of corresponding magnetic letters and invite your preschooler to drop the letters into the matching pot.
Fill the Letter Pots
Here is a similar or alternative alphabet activity for St. Patrick’s Day. Grab a few sets of those foam shamrocks from the dollar store and write the same letter on multiple shamrocks. Place them all in a stack and have your preschooler draw the shamrocks one at a time. Add a gold acrylic gem into the cauldron pot that corresponds with each letter that’s drawn.
St. Patrick’s Day Initial Sound Magnet Matching
Grab those letter cauldrons again and some beginning sound magnetics. Sort out the corresponding beginning sound magnets in advance and then choose two or three letters for your preschoolers to work on at one time. Invite your preschooler to sort them.
Don’t Forget Fun St. Patrick’s Day Manipulatives
The supplies listed in this post are readily found at just about any dollar store, but for your convenience, I’ve added some links if you’d rather order them online.
How About Some St. Patrick’s Day Picture Books?
I love reading stories to my preschoolers, especially for St. Patrick’s Day. Here are my go-to picture books for our favorite green holiday.
Get Your Free Shamrock Letter Matching Mats Here
Add these shamrock letter matching mats to your St. Patrick’s Day lesson plans. They are just one of many great literacy activities you can do with them. Click the image below to grab your own copy.
I’m Sarah, an educator turned stay-at-home-mama of five! I’m the owner and creator of Stay At Home Educator, a website about intentional teaching and purposeful learning in the early childhood years. I’ve taught a range of levels, from preschool to college and a little bit of everything in between. Right now my focus is teaching my children and running a preschool from my home. Credentials include: Bachelors in Art, Masters in Curriculum and Instruction.
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