Help your students feel the Luck of the Irish with fun and engaging activities for St. Patrick’s Day! From writing to math to reading, you will have all of your bases covered! Your students will enjoy switching up the normal routine as they complete these activities for St. Patrick’s Day. You’ll love that they are still practicing rigorous academic skills!
Let’s face it. March can be a tough month! You are smack dab in the middle of the longest stretch of the school year. However, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in your classroom is a great way to break up the monotony and get your students excited about learning! Here are some of my favorite activities for St. Patrick’s Day.
St. Patrick’s Day Writing Activities
Write a St. Patrick’s Day Story
Centers are a perfect way to integrate fun St. Patrick’s Day activities into your daily learning. Because centers are something you already do with your students, you won’t have to worry about planning something completely new.
One of my favorite St. Patrick’s Day center activities is the You Can Write a Story activity. It was a great way to engage my students in writing while also having fun with a center. My students loved using the St. Patrick’s Day themed cards to choose a setting, a problem, and a character to include in their writing. I always made sure to include several graphic organizers to help my students plan their writing before getting started. Students loved that they each got to make their own unique narrative.
I always loved letting my students share out their sometimes very silly stories with the class at the end of the day. I love that this activity is a sure-fire way to turn reluctant writers into avid writers.
St. Patrick’s Day Would You Rather Writing
Another favorite writing activity with students is Would You Rather writing prompts. Students really love having to choose between two options and writing about which one they would rather have, see or do. I always loved these writing prompts because they were a great way to get my students a little better. Try this Free St. Patrick’s Day Would You Rather Writing Prompts and have some fun Irish fun with your students!
Activities for St. Patrick’s Day: Logic Puzzles
Logic puzzles are a fantastic way to help students develop skills in logical thinking, problem-solving, making inferences, drawing conclusions, recognizing similarities and differences, AND comparing and contrasting.
That is why I loved using these St. Patrick’s Day Logic Puzzles with my students during the month of March. My students always enjoyed completing these Sudoku-like puzzles. They got so excited about using the St. Patrick’s Day themed images to complete each row or set in the grid.
Because these logic puzzles were different from our normal everyday activities, my students flocked to the novelty and got so excited about completing each of the puzzles.
The St. Patrick’s day Logic Puzzles are so versatile, you can use them in center, as morning work, as a fun Friday activity or as an early finisher activity. The best part about these logic puzzles is they are easy for students as young as Kindergarten to complete independently.
Activities for St. Patrick’s Day: Math Games
One of my favorite ways to celebrate holidays when I was in the classroom was to play themed games! St. Patrick’s Day lends itself easily to several math-type board games that will have your students engaged and having fun while they are actually practicing math. Here are a few examples of St. Patrick’s Day Math Games that my students loved playing over the years!
Race for the Pot of Gold
Race for the Pot of Gold is a great board game style activity for St. Patrick’s Day. Groups play on a game board with a spinner that leads to a pot of gold. One student rolls the 3 dice.
After rolling, all of the students must try to create the largest number possible with numbers on the dice. Players record their numbers on their piece of paper. The player with the largest number spins the spinner and moves forward that number of spaces.
The first player to reach the pot of gold is the winner. This activity for St. Patrick’s Day is a great way for students to practice place value! It also doesn’t require any special supplies to set up and play.
Shamrock Love = Doubles + 1
This game is a simple but fun way to have your students practice addition on St. Patrick’s Day!
Students play in pairs and take turns spinning a spinner made with a paperclip and pencil. They have to double the number the spinner lands on and then add 1. On the game board is a list of 10 numbers. If they have that number, they cover it up. The first one to cover all 10 numbers wins!
This game is perfect for partners to play in math centers. But it also makes a great early finisher activity, small group game or as a partner morning work activity.
Keep Your Hands Off My Gold!
This activity for St. Patrick’s day is played like another popular classroom game called Bump.
Students are given a game board with images of gold coins with numbers. Since St. Patrick’s Day is on March 17th, students will be adding or subtracting 17. Using addition and subtraction students will combine the numbers on two dice and then add or subtract 17 to try to mak a number on the gameboard. This is a great way to practice adding and subtracting with 3 numbers.
When students find a matching number, they will cover the number with a token. You can use mini-erasers, a paperclip, a piece of leprechaun gold, or even other math manipulative you already have on hand. And . . . if the board is laminated students can even use two different colors of dry erase markers.
The goal of this fun game is to have the most coins covered on the board. But, there is a catch! A student’s pawn can be bumped off its coin if their opponent gets the same total. Don’t worry though, I promise the game will not last forever! If a student gets, the same total twice they set two pawns on the space, and that space is locked. No other player can steal that number.
My room was full of giggles and friendly competition when we played this game.
Roll and Cover 5 in a Row
This game is a great mix of factor and product practice with logic. In this St. Patrick’s Day math activity, students roll two dice and then cover a product OR factor of the two numbers on the game board. Example: If a student rolled a 4 and 5, they could place a marker on 20, 1, 2, 10, 4, or 5.
The object of the game is to cover 5 numbers in a row, so students need to employ some logic to decide where would be best to place their markers and which factor or product they should choose. The first player to cover 5 spaces in a row either vertically, horizontally, or diagonally wins.
St. Patrick’s Day Task Cards
Task cards just might be one of my top teaching resources because they are so versatile! You can use task cards for a whole class game of Scoot, in a math center, for small group instruction or just to have a bunch of skill-specific math problems or questions at your fingertips.
These money skill math task cards are perfect for your March math centers or St. Patrick’s Day activities. Using these task cards, students will be applying their money knowledge with addition and subtraction to answer the word problems. I don’t know about you but any time I can incorporate multiple skills into one activity that is a win!
St. Patrick’s Day Game Show
Out of all the activities for St. Patrick’s Day, I most enjoyed getting the class together to play a round of this Jeopardy style St. Patrick’s Day Game Show!
In this game, there are 25 questions in the following categories: St. Patty’s Day, Wee Folk (questions about leprechauns), Make 17 (math questions which have 17 as the answer), Green’s the Thing (questions in which the word green is part of the answer), and Are You Lucky? (questions about lucky charms).
I would start by splitting the class into 4 or 5 groups depending on the size. Each group got a whiteboard and took turns writing answers. You could either play by having the groups “buzz in” or each group could get a dedicated turn.
I let the students know that they always had a chance to “steal” points so they should be ready with an answer to every questions. This helped keep all players engaged and ready to go!
The best part of using this game is that students still get to do some academic work, but we got to have fun as a class as well! You can grab this fun St. Patrick’s Day game in my store on Teachers Pay Teachers for free!
Bonus Activities for St. Patrick’s Day: Read Aloud Books
I absolutely loved any opportunity to bring reading and fun books into my classroom. There are so many wonderful books to use for holidays and special occasions to incorporate into your lesson plans that it can be hard to choose. Here are a few of my very favorite St. Patrick’s Day themed books to read with your class during the month of March.
Fiona’s Luck by Teresa Bateman
This story is great for tying in some Irish history to your activities for St. Patrick’s Day as it touches on the Irish Potato Famine. The story is about a girl named Fiona who must use her wit to solve a big problem.
During Fiona’s time, there was a leprechaun king who was very angry that people were using up all of the luck, so he stole it away. Because the people were left with no luck they faced hard times. Fiona sets out to save the day and get their luck back by outwitting the leprechaun king!
Jamie O’Rourke and the Big Potato by Tomie dePaola
Who doesn’t love a good Tomie dePaola book? That is why Jamie O’Rourke and the Big Potato is another great read for St. Patrick’s Day!
This retelling of an Irish folk tale includes luck, leprechauns, magic potato seeds, and more. The story is just as amazing as you are already imagining.
That’s What Leprechauns Do by Eve Bunting
This humorous tale shows that leprechauns do a lot more than just hide gold at the end of the rainbow! They also like to cause a lot of mischief along the way!
Engaging animal characters will keep your students excited about reading all about the leprechauns’ antics on St. Patrick’s Day! This book makes a great starting place for some fun leprechaun themed writing prompts too. Students can write about how they would catch a naughty leprechaun or what they would do if they were a leprechaun.
Save These Activities for St. Patrick’s Day for Later
Pin these activities for St. Patrick’s Day to your favorite classroom Pinterest board, so you can come back when you are ready to to plan your St. Patrick’s day activities in March!
