a sparkly shamrock morning

Yesterday morning, we made our decorations for St. Patrick’s Day, and because I don’t love to bring out paints other than watercolors very often, the kids had a blast.

• Shamrocks: Like most of what we do, this activity was super-simple. I cut out very basic shamrock shapes from green paper, just by folding the paper in half and cutting along the outline I drew. Maddy and Owen both cut theirs out; Owen had some difficulty because of the curves.

After we had a bunch of shamrocks, I covered our table in newspaper, had the kids throw on their smocks, and we got rolling. Today we were going to see what happened when we put blobs of paint (we used Crayola washable kids’ paint) and glitter glue (I have to exercise some control, now, right?) on one side of the shamrock, folded it, then opened it again. The only tools the kiddos could use were some large Popsicle sticks.

With this new challenge ahead of them, I modeled for them my idea. I poured some green, yellow, and blue paint on a paper plate, then, using the stick, dropped globs on one half of my shamrock. I swirled it around a bit, then squirted some glitter glue around. I folded it, smashed it together, and opened it. It looked great, and from that point, they wanted to get started.

The whole idea of symmetry is fascinating at first for little ones; Maddy’s eyes lit up when she cut out a heart for Valentine’s Day, and it was the same way today–first opening the newly-cut shamrock, then opening the “painted” one. This craft is pretty easy, but that’s how we like it over here. We knew we had our auto shop tour coming up later, so we had to keep it easy. Buena suerte!