St. Patrick’s Day is approaching quickly! I’m so excited that my son, Luke, is now at the age where he is able to do so much more! (Toddlers are just so much FUN!)
We had such a blast with these St. Patrick’s Day activities for toddlers!
I’m excited to announce that all of the following St. Patrick’s Day activities can be found in my FIRST Tiny Tots Toddler Curriculum Unit! Creating this play-based toddler curriculum has been a dream of mine for a while and I’m SO excited it’s finally coming to fruition.
You can check out the St. Patrick’s unit here.
Tiny Tots Curriculum Units are created for toddlers ages 18 months – 3 years. They have eight main components: fine motor activities, cognitive activities, gross motor activities, sensory activities, art activities, snack ideas, vocabulary words, and suggested books.
The activities are also differentiated with variations of each activity to meet the needs of each individual child.
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Books
The St. Patrick’s themed books for this unit are:
1. Lucky Little Leprechaun By Patrick O’Puffinton
2. Happy St. Patrick’s Day By Aimee Chapman, Penny Worms, and Kylie Hamley
3. The Itsy Bitsy Leprechaun By Jeffrey Burton
4. Pout-Pout Fish Lucky Leprechaun By Deborah Diesen
5. The Littlest Leprechaun By Brandy Dougherty
Rainbow Coin Drop
Luke LOVES putting objects in boxes or containers. This activity was really easy to set up and is GREAT for fine motor practice. I just took an old oatmeal container and wrapped different colors of construction paper around it to make a rainbow, then cut a slit in the lid. I grabbed some plastic gold coins and had him drop them in the top of the container.
Feed the Leprechaun
This activity was so cute (and Luke couldn’t stop making eating noises while he fed the leprechaun shamrocks).
I attached the leprechaun head to a small cardboard box and cut a slit in the mouth and then printed the shamrocks from the unit (you can use plastic coins too).
Shamrock Sticky Wall
I LOVE sticky walls (and so do toddlers). We taped a piece of contact paper to the wall (sticky side out) then cut the outline of a shamrock and placed it on the contact paper. I had Luke tear up some paper before sticking the pieces to the inside of the shamrock.
St. Patrick’s Matching
This matching activity is great for cognitive development. I printed two copies from the Tiny Tots St. Patrick’s Day Unit, then laminated both of them before cutting up one copy.
I had to offer some support to Luke for this activity (he’s only 15 months), but overall he got the beginning concepts of matching!
Rainbow Pasta Sort
To prep this activity, you need to dye some pasta. I have a really easy recipe for dyeing rice or pasta here.
I took solo cups and wrapped some different colored construction paper around them. (I only chose to use four colors because Luke is still getting the concept of sorting down, but you can use as many or as little as you’d like).
St. Patrick’s Sensory Bins
Ah, sensory bins. Safe to say I’m obsessed with them – and so is Luke.
Sensory bins are great for early exploration, fine motor practice, vocabulary enrichment, problem-solving skills and SO much more!
There are tons of different options for St. Patrick’s Day themed sensory bins, but for this one, I included green colored rice, plastic gold coins, mini cauldrons, and scoopers.
St. Patrick’s Sensory Bottles
Sensory bottles are a great mess-free activity for sensory exploration! (For more DIY sensory activities, check out this video.) I have a bottle with rainbow pony beads that I pulled out for a sound bottle.
I also made a liquid bottle using water, green food coloring, green and gold glitter, and shamrock confetti (again, you can put any themed objects in your sensory bottle).
St. Patrick’s Glitter Slime
Luke has been LOVING slime lately, so I whipped up a batch of green glitter slime to keep with the St. Patrick’s theme. It’s super easy to make.
Here’s the recipe:
1 bottle of 6 oz Elmer’s Green Glitter Glue
½ teaspoon of Baking Soda
1 ½ Tablespoons of Contact Lens Solution (make sure it contains the ingredients boric acid and sodium borate)
I also opted to add more green and gold glitter to the slime, but it’s optional if you get the glitter glue.
Shamrock Hide and Seek or Scavenger Hunt
This Shamrock Hide and Seek activity was such a hit! Luke loved running around the house and grabbing the shamrocks off of the walls. Because he’s so young, I just taped them to obvious places at his eye level, but if your child is a little older you can make this more challenging.
For the older toddlers, I created a St. Patrick’s Scavenger Hunt. There is a recording sheet to accompany this activity in the unit that kids can use to check off the objects as they find them.
Either way, these activities are great for getting those little legs moving!
Rainbow Relay
This gross motor activity was so simple but Luke LOVED it. If your toddler is on the younger side you can keep this really simple. I set up two baskets on opposite ends of the room and threw in some different colored pom-poms in the one, then had Luke run them over to the other basket.
If your child is older, you can add some more advanced twists to this relay game, such as setting up different buckets and sorting by color, adding different themed objects, or calling out a specific color or object to have your child find before running it to the other basket.
Rainbow Obstacle Course
For this activity, we set up multiple colors of crepe paper across the room, then had Luke crawl under them. I thought for SURE he was going to just rip them down, but after watching my husband, Mike, demonstrate what to do, he crawled through with ease multiple times!
If your child is a little older, feel free to get creative with this! Have them try to walk or crawl through the different colors without their bodies touching them.
Also, if you have a little one and all they want to do is rip the paper down – let them! They’re still working those large muscle groups, which is what this activity is all about!
Shamrock Stamping
I don’t know what it is, but I love using non-art materials for art projects.
For this St. Patrick’s craft, we cut off the end of a green bell pepper and dipped it in some green paint, then stamped it on white paper to make some simple shamrocks! I helped Luke paint a little stem on each one after we were all done.
Do-a-Dot Rainbows
Dot markers are such a great tool, especially for little artists! We just printed the rainbow templates from the Tiny Tots unit (there are both black and white and colored options available), then I just helped Luke to stamp them on the paper.
He actually did pretty good with this for his first time working with dot markers and even stayed on the dots fairly well! Do-a-dot activities are great for strengthening hand-eye coordination as well.
If you want to check out the rest of the activities in my Tiny Tots St. Patrick’s Day Toddler Unit, you can do so here!
Have you tried any of these activities before? Comment below if you have OR let us know which one you’re most excited to try!
