A wee bit of Irish fun..

I love St. Patrick's Day~ maybe it's that little bit of Scotch-Irish in me that makes me love a wee bit of fun?! I also love the fact that 1st graders fall for the shenanigans hook,line, and sinker! Last week I read the story, The Luckiest Leprechaun: A Tail-Wagging Tale of Friendship. As we were reading the last page, a little note from Louie the Leprechaun fell to the floor. Louie mentioned that he had been looking for his gold in our classroom and, well, the rest is history. Each day, Louie has been doing something in our classroom: leaving a book, a message on the SMARTboard, a writing project, etc. Today in his frustration of not being able to find his gold, he asked the kids where they would hide their gold if they were leprechauns. He then left special paper and a project for them to display their answers on. He told us he'd be back tonight to see their ideas. In the meantime, Louie found out how to access our classroom blog and was a bit of a sheister when he took our 3D shape hunt pictures and put them into a Smilebox album for us, complete with little sayings on each slide. The kids were pumped about that as they could hear the Irish music playing in the hallway when they came in from recess. ( I have no idea how Louie managed that while we were gone to recess- wink, wink) Tonight I also noticed that he went on the blog and created a Voki- hmmm... a tech savvy leprechaun, what do you know!?!

Tomorrow he is leaving us a graph (Do you believe in leprechauns?) another note, and a money game to play during math game tub time. Sure glad that he's been a nice leprechaun, even if he has been sneaky. I hope he won't be upset when the kids bring their leprechaun traps to school tomorrow to try and catch him. The traps are an at home project that I encourage families to take part in each year. When the kiddos bring them in, they tell us about how they built their traps and how they work. I'll post some pics of their creations later this week.
Although we have a lot of fun with all of the tom-foolery, I've worked hard over the years to embed the silliness into our curriculum so that learning time isn't lost on fluff- hence the writing project complete with an Irish editor's checklist, a graph and money game for math, notes on the SMARTboard which we use as part of our shared reading and then respond back as part of our interactive writing, the many books he leaves for read alouds and guided reading, and the crazy note he leaves us in the computer lab which takes us to some fun St. Patrick's Day sites.  All of this is spread out a little at a time over the course of the week leading up to St. Patrick's Day. The excitement that is brewing in my class right now is exciting, a great way to spice up the winter doldrums!