St. Patrick's Day Crafts and Activities

St. Patrick's might only be one day, but I still love to spread some rainbow cheer and pots of gold throughout the month of March along with other Spring themes in my centers and display crafts! If you're looking for some fun St. Patrick's activities to use this March, I'm sharing a few oldies, some new activities and a couple of freebies for your kindergarten classroom.

Math Activities 

Hands-on math activities are my absolute favorite part of math centers! Here are 3 different independent activities you can use in your classroom to practice counting, addition and subtraction. 

Math crafts work great as independent practice or in a math center! Not only are you fitting in core practice but fine motor practice as well! This St. Patties Shamrock Shake craft has subtraction or addition (within 20) options. Students can use counters and the 10 frame to solve their clover problem set before crafting. Click here to check out this math craft!

These St. Patricks Day Addition and Subtraction stations are low-prep and pair great with common class items like cubes, dough or pom poms to help make practice time student led & interactive. This set has 20 game mats to pick from and supports addition and subtraction within 10. You can grab the mats by clicking here.

FREEBIE: Counting routine GOLD! Spice up your counting to 20 practice with these fill in the blank Pots of Gold. Students will practice counting from a given number within 20 and find the missing numbers. These cards are easy to prep and can be used as write & wipe cards or paired with magnetic numbers. Click here to access the FREEBIE

Writing Craft 

What would you do with a Pot of Gold? In this activity, your students will get the chance to practice writing, illustrating and crafting. The little pots look cute on display and it's always fun listening to your students share what they'd spend their GOLD on. This was one of my first crafts and it got a major update in 2020! Click here for the Writing Craft 

Rainbow Booklet

Are your students interested in rainbows? One year, I had a class of students obsessed with the rainbow. So, in March (right before St. Patties) we conducted a little rainbow research. If you have access to Pebble Go this FREE flip-book pairs perfectly with its format. Click here for your free rainbow flip-book 

Prior to our research, we made a KWL chart to discuss what we knew about rainbows and what we wonder about them to guide our Pebble Go inquiries. We spent a total of 3 days on our booklets. On our final day, we were able to complete the "L" part of our chart and share what we learned about rainbows. 

If you're looking for more Spring Activities, you might enjoy:

Number Bonds and Hands On Activities

In kindergarten, students are faced with multiple models of addition and subtraction and asked to find sums and differences within 10. My ALL TIME favorite model is the number bond. A “Number Bond” is just a visual representation for part, part, whole and tool for breaking apart and joining numbers.

About the Number Bond

A number bond, often appearing as 3 circles: 2 parts, 1 whole, can look intimidating if unfamiliar with this type of model. I’ve seen many kiddos get confused by the parts vs. the whole when completing a bond - especially when the model uses equal sized circles. In my former district, the model was always given in this format. My first year of teaching kindergarten, I came up with a trick to help my students easily identify the parts and the whole of the number bond to aid with their solving. We called our Number Bond… MR. Number Bond! (this is old image, but hopefully gives you an idea)

Mr. Number Bond is your traditional circle bond, but I placed emphasis on his 2 STRONG ARMS! (the 2 lines coming from the whole) Mr. Bond is so STRONG because HE (the whole) carries the biggest number and holds two parts that are equal to him. Before we ever used this tool, the kids would practice rotating their bond and locate the parts vs. the whole. You can grab a free Mr. Number Bond mat here. 

Solving with a Number Bond

Quickly interpreting the given information in a number bond (like the parts from whole) is very helpful in solving and knowing which process (compose/decompose) to use to finding the unknown.

This set is included in the Addition Task Cards: Click Here to View

Composing/ finding sums came very quickly and naturally, students learned that when our “whole” is unknown on our mats (like above) that we needed to add our 2 parts to find it! Like in this example: We were given two parts "3" and "3." By counting out 3 and 3 students will determine that 6 is unknown whole.

This set is included in the Subtraction Task Cards: Click Here to View

Finding the difference/decomposing was a little more challenging at first - especially if seeing a numeral as the whole. When students are given the whole and a 1 part, they will need to use subtraction to find the unknown part. (This model is visually great for seeing the inverse operation of addition/subtraction)

Using counters, I have my kiddos represent the “whole” ASAP with a visual that’s concrete/moveable. Then, we use the information given to us (our part) and subtract it by removing pieces to solve for the unknown part.  Like in this example: Students count out 1:1 the given whole and subtract the given part (6) to find our unknown number of 4.

Get Hands-On with Number Bonds

This learner was ready for higher addition practice in February & playing cards help with easy differentiation! This mat and recording sheet are from the larger Winter Mat Bundle of mixed skills!

After learning number bonds, this model was a constant small group warm-up and ongoing center in our class. Students became EXPERTS using them and solving beyond sums and differences to 10! It’s also a fantastic model to support with solving story problems as well! Here are some additional activities that we used during the year to practice bonds. These game mats are from my different Math Mat Collections that includes number bonds and varied styles of addition and subtraction.

Expo markers or "counters" like matching mini erasers work great for counting out sets and completing the problem! This mat is part of Easter Addition and Subtraction

Using cards makes for easy differentiation! This activity is in St. Patrick's Addition and Subtraction

If you're looking for more hands-on addition and subtraction fun,  you might check out: