Leprechaun Fun & a Freebie!

Silly McGilly came to our classroom this week and the kids loved him! Of course they made the inevitable connection to Elf On The Shelf, but they liked the fact that we could touch the Silly McGilly doll. Many of them had never heard about leprechauns, so they were thrilled with the idea of a new magical character. The instructions in the book say to place the doll on the windowsill if you want Silly McGilly to visit, so that's what we did:

Our window blinds are permanently closed (because they're so old that opening and closing is now beyond their capabilities) so we set Silly down underneath the "L" for leprechaun of course! There he sat...until Silly McGilly played a trick...

 Like bringing us a new rug and tablecloth for our Housekeeping Center!

 

 Or making a Rainbow of Rice in our Sensory Table!

There were shiny gold pieces too (glass gens spray painted gold) that were labeled with upper or lower case letters or numbers!

I made special mats to hold our "treasure" and depending on who went to the center, I changed up our "game" by asking them to find all of the letter gold or number gold depending if they needed more help with number recognition or letter sounds. This is just one of the ways I try to differentiate my centers so that I can get some targeted practice in for each student, no matter which center they choose to play at!

Silly brought us some new St. Patrick's Day Roll & Cover games as well, along with some beans that had been painted green on one side and left white on the other side. These replaced our usual counters and one student was the white side while the other student used the green side.

We made some leprechaun hats, but Silly thought they were for him, so he shrank them to make them fit! He left us some pencils in a rainbow bucket to make up for it though.(inspired by this pin)

 He left us some pot of gold mats for our Play Dough Center too. The kids had a lot of fun making the correct number of "gold pieces" to go into each pot!

 He left us some baggies of "magic green gel" to go with our St. Patrick's Day Alphabet Match-Up cards. He even found the 3 matches for "S"!

The most fun though, happened when Silly left us this note:

 

 

Silly hung out in the lounge until the kids went to breakfast, then he snuck outside with his rocks.

 Silly left the "special rocks" all over our playground! (I made a pasty dough of baking soda, green food coloring and water and hid gold coins inside, inspired by this pin)

The kids had a blast searching for them - the rule was, once they found one, they brought it back to where the Silly McGilly doll had been placed inside a shallow tub with a bottle of "water" (aka vinegar).

Once all of the kids had found a "special rock", we poured the "water" over the rocks, and they started to fizz! The kids were super excited and we got to use some great vocabulary like "predict", "dissolve", and "reaction"; as well as "Wow!" "Gold!" and "That is so cool!"

The kids took turns playing in the resulting green sludge, fishing out the gold coins! Each child took home a "lucky coin" from Silly McGilly!

I overheard one little sweetie say "I love Silly McGilly!" and another agreed with her "He's so nice to do all of this stuff for us. I wish we could do something for him!" So they decided to draw him pictures at our Writing Center:

Here's Silly outside the house while my student is sleeping in her room.

And here's Silly at the beach, swimming in the ocean. Love the belly button! My kiddos have recently begun tracing various objects when drawing, thus Silly's perfectly rounded head and rectangular body lol!

All in all, it was one of the most fun weeks we've had - and the best way to launch our Spring Break vacation! If you'd like a copy of the St. Patrick's Day Sensory Table mats, just click here to find them for free in my TPT store!