Happy St. Patrick's Day

A few days before St. Patrick's Day, my class began to talk about what happened last year in their 3k classes when the leprechaun came into their classroom and messed things up.  With the help of a great professor at CUW Mequon, we took some time to make traps.  We created plans, letters, and had a lot of conversations about how this would work.....

Where to set up the trap? What to use? I had saved some boxes from our snacks and we ended up using all of them, the kids decided to use the doll house as a trap, and used the boxes and lego center to help the leprechaun get up to the house.

It was decided that the windows would have to be covered with paper, and you can see a student also building stairs to get up to the house

Lucky Charms were used as the bait, a few in each cup until the top where all the marshmallows would be waiting.

This was a dinosaur play area, we would eventually add water to the cup to see if the leprechaun was thirsty or would spill it

Eventually we had 3 traps or two traps and a play area....when it was all said and done, below are the some of the notes we left outside the door (low enough that the leprechaun could read them)

We graphed what we thought would happen (if we would trap him), and then we talked about why we didn't catch him and what we could try differently next time.  I would definitely add another writing piece to this next time, a class book to help remember all the work we did.

The Igloo

I have always wanted to build an igloo in my classroom.... So this year right after Christmas Break, I began to collect milk containers. I found a lot of other teacher posts that made it seem very easy..... So I started.

Seemed easy enough when I started, but quickly I realized that I did not have enough milk containers

So this is how far I got with my husbands help after about 3 hours....and we knew that it was not very stable...maybe our glue wasn't hot enough, maybe we had too many different sizes of containers, or maybe we needed a stronger base, but I knew that we would not be able to do a roof.  So the kiddos decided it was a castle (like from Frozen) or a snow fort, and they liked it just the same.  I am not sure that I will ever do one again...it was a lot of work!  So far it has held up fairly well, and the kids really do enjoy playing in it, so that makes it worth the hard work!