All week, we learned about St. Patrick’s Day—the history and different things people do around the world to celebrate. I love any and all Gail Gibbons’ books, so her book on St. Patrick’s Day seemed like an obvious choice for an introductory text.
My students are very inquisitive, so when we read the page about leprechauns in the Gibbons book, they were incredibly curious. Lots of questions—Where do leprechauns live? Are leprechauns nice or mean? What do they look like? Are all leprechauns boys? Can there be girl leprechauns? Why do leprechauns wear green?
Because of all of the questions, I thought we could explore leprechauns a little more. The next day we read The Leprechaun’s Gold by Pamela Duncan Edwards. It was a cute story that introduced the mischievous reputation of leprechaun’s but in the end the leprechauns turned out to be very helpful and sweet.
In the next few days, my students started using leprechauns as explanations for things that happened in our room or at their homes. One little boy said, “Ms. P, can you tie my shoes?” As I was tying them, he said, “You know how this happened, don’t you? I was concentrating really hard in writer’s workshop. I wasn’t paying attention and a leprechaun crawled under the table and untied my shoes!”
On St. Patrick’s Day, when the kiddos came back from lunch we found someone had trashed our classroom and our cookies with green frosting and sprinkles for our party were missing! We looked everywhere and the only clue we could find was a trail of green glitter leading to the window sill!
After we cleaned up the mess, it was time to go to centers. After a very fun play day, it was time for art class. After the students returned from art class, they found that the cookies we had for our party were back and there was a note on the board.
We enjoyed our cookies, put on a little magic dust for good luck and decided leprechauns weren’t so bad after all. They get a bad rap because they like to play jokes and tricks on people, but at the end of the day they’re sweet little guys. Some days in Kindergarten it’s fun to just be silly and believe in things that are magical without a logical explanation. I love seeing my students enamored at make-believe things without reason and listen to their own creative takes on things like lucky leprechaun dust or little green men. Days like these are what makes being a Kindergarten teacher so fun, I hope my students enjoyed it as much as I did.
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