Is it just me, or do other teachers feel like St. Patrick's Day is even more hectic and crazy than the Friday before Christmas vacation?! I have to admit, the crazy antics of the Leprechaun did not help matters. That sneaky little guy made his way to our classroom sometime early Friday morning, before we all got to school. 😉 He flipped over chairs, threw gold glitter everywhere, made a mess of the room with green streamers, and dropped a few gold coins along the way. According to one of my first graders "that Leprechaun needs to take a tub because his feet are super dirty! He must have stepped on so many four-leaf clovers on his way here from Ireland!"
While the morning was extremely crazy, the excitement began to wear off somewhere around lunch time. It was a relatively calm afternoon, until it was my bright idea for my students to do a narrative writing assignment titled "How to Catch a Leprechaun." I have to say, some ideas that my students came up with were very clever, and I'm sure had the Leprechaun not been a fictional character, some of the kids may have been able to catch him. 😜
Many of my students even asked if they could use their writing to then draw a picture of their plan or their leprechaun trap, and some even asked if they could build a trap at home over the weekend. This gave me a wonderful idea for future years. I will make an attempt to have my students complete this writing assignment prior to St. Patricks Day. Then they will use their plan to actually create the trap (tying in a bit of engineering)!
Overall even though it was a completely crazy day, it brought me back to when I was a first grader and my teacher did the same thing to our classroom on St. Patrick's Day. Seeing the excitement on my students' faces, once again reminded me why I do what I do! All I could say at the end of the day was "Thank God it's Friday!"
