The Naughty Leprechaun!

It might be February, but we all know time flies when you teach littles!  If you're like me, you're always trying to look ahead to what's coming up so that there is time for preparation and on-line ordering (if needed).  

I am looking into March's plans and wanted to share a fabulous book with y'all:

(Click the book to visit Stephanie's website!)

 

I was contacted by the book's author, Stephanie Hicks, to review this book and it's 100% adorable and perfect for St. Patrick's Day.  It comes in a beautiful case to protect the book.  The case also holds a gold coin of the naughty leprechaun, Leyland, and the nice leprechaun, Liam.  Check out this video:

This book is perfect if you celebrate St. Patrick's day themed activities in your classroom.

In my room, I love to build leprechaun traps with my littles and this book mentions leprechaun traps.  Leyland, the naughty leprechaun causes havoc and must be caught!  It will be an awesome book to read before the trap building.  

Here are some pictures of my kiddos traps over the last two school years:

 

Before building our traps, we made a plan on paper.

If you're interested in learning more about The Naughty Leprechaun book, click below to visit Stephanie's website or facebook page.

 

 

TO grab my FREE leprechaun trap planning page, click here.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Happy (early) St. Patrick's Day!

We celebrated St. Patrick's Day before leaving for Spring Break. (I love you Spring Break!)  It was a day filled with fun and excitement!  We started our day as normal as possible with completing this leprechaun/CVC activitiy.

Students chose a leprechaun and colored a leprechaun on their recording sheet that color.  Then stretched the sounds to spell the CVC word that was on the leprechaun's tummy.

We were also planning a visit from our buddies.  The day before, I told my cuties we would be playing a St. Patrick's Day game with our buddies and we needed decorated cups.  So we decorated them and placed them in a box.

That evening I took them home and shrunk them in the oven and placed them back in the box.

The next day (on our St. Patrick'sDay o' Fun) I opened the box and pretended to be surprised about the cups and found a note from a leprechaun stating that he loved the hats we left him but they were too big!

My cuties put them on and were shocked that a leprechaun thought our cups for our buddy game were hats.

We had to come up with a new idea fast!  Our buddies were coming and we needed an activity to do with them.  So I read the class this book to get some ideas.

This books talks about building leprechaun traps.  My cuties thought that would be a great idea so we gathered materials and prepared traps with our buddies.

First we designed our traps with this planning sheet from my TPT store.

 

Then we started building them!

 

While my cuties we away from the room, I snuck back and made footprints everywhere and sprinkled green glitter on their traps.  Let me tell you, they were so excited to return and would not stop checking their traps after that!

You can read about traps from last year on this post.

We also played a roll the leprechaun game.  My cuties LOVE these games!

Fro writer's workshop, we took a one day break from our Lucy Caulkin's curriculum and wrote about who we love more than gold.

Thanks Teacher Wife for this idea!

St. Patrick's Day Linky Party

I am linking up with Mary at Sharing Kindergarten to share some St. Patrick's Day fun!  Click the pic below to see all of the fun ideas!

I wanted to share my Leprechaun Trap with you.  I posted it last year here with more details.  Basically, we were tricked by a leprechaun's magical powers when he shrunk our cups and turned them into hats,  (Thanks Krissy Miner for the Shrinking Hat product!)  so we built leprechaun traps.

 

I had my cuties design their trap first with this freebie from my store before getting the materials needed to build the trap.

Here are some pics of our designs and built traps.

Visit Mary's blog, Sharing Kindergarten, for TONS of St. Patrick's Day ideas!

An award and some St. Patty's Day mischief!

Today was fabulous in so many ways!  I truly love my job, I have an amazing hubby and two sweet pups, and it's officially Spring Break.  Since we do not have school next week, I wanted to get some St. Patrick's Day fun in today.  It actually started yesterday. 

I told my cuties at the end of the day that we needed to design a cup in order to do a project tomorrow (today) with our third grade buddy class.  So I handed them all a styrofoam cup let them decorate it with permanent markers.

 

That was all we did yesterday because "we ran out of time".  So I gathered up their cups and placed them in a box. My cuties did not know that I took the box home and shrank them in the oven.

 

I placed them back in the box and took them back to school today, placing the box in the same place we left it the day before.

Today we returned to the project when our buddies arrived.  I opened the box and was in shock.  A leprechaun left us a note saying he had shrunk the cups and turned them into leprechaun hats!  My kiddies and their buddies were amazed and shocked too!  

We discussed what happened and I lamented over not having our cups for the project.  I asked them to listen to a story and try to think of a new project we could do with our buddies.

This book is great because it talks about building a leprechaun trap and shows many different types of traps.  After reading the story, we brainstormed what to do and they were all in agreement that we should build a trap to catch the leprechaun.

I gave them a paper to design their trap before building the trap.  You can snag it on my brand new Teachers Pay Teachers store !

 

Then they gathered the supplies they needed and created their traps.

 

 The pipe cleaners on the side are a ladder and the paper inside is gold to tempt the leprechaun.

How cute are these traps!

You can learn more about the shrinky hats on Mrs. Miner's Monkey Business.

We also completed this writing assignment.

 

I got this idea from The Teacher Wife.

I would like to thank Marissa at Wild About First Grade for giving me the Top 10 award!  Thank you oodles!

 

I would like to nominate the following blogs for this special award:

1.  The Daily Alphabet

2.  Kindergarten Kel

3.  Mrs. Plant's Press

4.  Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten

5.  Loving and Learning in Pre-K

6.  Wolfelicious

7.  Apples and ABC's

8.  The Daily Cupcake

Happy Friday, Everyone!