St. Patrick's Day...In Spanish!

St. Patrick's Day is right around the corner!

I have to admit, that while I am absolutely 0% Irish and I nearly ALWAYS forget to wear green, I am a sucker for this holiday.  When else can you sing songs about unicorns with strangers and contemplate what you would do with a pot of gold if you were able to catch the sneakily little trickster we call a Leprechaun?

Speaking of, every year my boys spend hours designing and creating a Leprechaun trap similar to this one below:

Finally in First Blog

(The above photo was posted on the Finally in First Blog--hop on over there to see some other great ideas for this activity!)

St. Patrick's Day Math and Language Arts Spanish Bundle for Early Elementary

On a more "traditional" academic front, I like to take advantage of holidays for them to review different concepts that we have been working on in Spanish.

As soon as I began printing, both boys begged me to work on "Sumar y Pintar".  It is common core aligned with addition facts up to 20, but who am I to deny my 2nd grader more math practice?

Here we are getting started:

My eldest also loves to color:

Putting on some finishing touches:

My 1st grader wanted to stick with math, so he worked on a graphing activity.  Here he had to count the number of objects that he saw and record using tally marks.

Then, he graphed them using a different color per object:

We finally worked on some dictionary skills:  putting a list of words in alphabetical order.  It was a good exercise as he was not familiar with all of the words (especially reading them!), but he was very excited to complete this exercise!

My 2nd grader wanted to continue with math as well, but I wanted him to work on reading skills.  We compromised with some story problems.  They were simple for him mathematically, but provided him with a great opportunity to read a bit more in Spanish.  After he finished the exercises, we decorated the paper together!

He did give in and worked on some sentence editing.  While he writes very well, he still forgets to use correct punctuation and capitalization at times, but he did great!  He even found the incorrect verb conjugation and missing accent on "mamá" without my help!

Over the next week or two, we will continue to work on some other activities in the packet including skip counting, writing prompts, noun and verb sort, etc. Click through if you would like to see more information about the St Patricks Early Elementary Spanish Language Arts and Math bundle.

St. Patrick's Day Fill-ins (in Spanish)

Another fun St. Patrick's Day themed activity that I have shared with my kids are "Fill-ins."  They are inspired by "Mad Libs" and 100% in Spanish.  Fill-ins are an awesome way for students to work on reading, writing, parts of speech, and vocabulary development.  The best part:  they never realize that they are learning!  I encourage my students to be as silly as possible and create crazy stories.

My boys are probably a little young to be doing fill-ins (I recommend them for students in grade 3 and up--for Traditional Spanish as well as Dual-Language/Immersion students) but with a little help from me, they did just fine.

First, they took turns filling out the word list:

It can be a lot of work to think of the right word (he was trying to remember the word for "paperclips" in Spanish).

Some of the questions just make you giggle!

They ended up with a cute little story about Igor the Leprechaun!

The packet has a total of 3 fill-ins -- all in present tense and appropriate for children.  

If you would like more information about it, please check it out in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

I hope you are able to use some of these ideas for your kids on St. Patty's Day!!!