Happy St. Patrick's Day!

We've got a cake cooling on the counter and I'm getting ready to whip up some soda bread and shepherd's pie.  We've had a fun week of crafting and reading and learning about Ireland and St. Patrick.  The highlight was definitely the great lapbook from In the Hands of a Child.  Here are some pictures of our activities over the last week:

We attended a storytime/craft session at our local library and this shamrock hat was the craft for the day.  All three of the kids had a lot of fun during storytime.

Later that day, we made our Trinity shamrocks from foam pieces that I'd cut out in advance.  The small glittered symbols were adhesive-backed, which made it quite easy for both Jane and Oliver to make their own.

Henry thought the St. Patrick puppet was the coolest thing ever.  He was really excited to show this one to Matt when he got home from work.

We used an old display board to set up an impromptu puppet theater.  Henry is actually regaling me with facts about Ireland and legends of St. Patrick in this picture.  I guess some of the lapbook stuff sank in!

When he remembered his little box of toy snakes, Henry decided that he needed to act out the legend about St. Patrick driving all of the snakes of Ireland into the sea.

And, the lapbook!  This was so worth the $5 we paid for the PDF file.  It was great to have a little schedule laid out for us for each day so the activities weren't overwhelming.  It was also nice to have the ability to customize some of the mini-books for non-writers.

The first flap has an Irish flag, colored by Henry, and facts about Ireland set up as a flip book.

The first section is a St. Patrick's day mini-greeting card, a counting poem called "5 Little Shamrocks", the vocabulary words for the lesson, a "When and Why" on St. Patrick's Day, some Gaelic words, symbols of the day, and another little Irish flag.

The last section has the Breastplate of St. Patrick, a spinner with symbols of the different legends of St. Patrick, a scale comparing the number of Irish in Ireland and America, the canonization process, how St. Patrick got his name, and different ways that people celebrate the holiday.

 All dressed in green and really happy with his own book!  And since we paused for lunch in the middle of this post, I can say that the soda bread and shepherd's pie were great (and so was the cake). 

Happy St. Patrick's Day!