I spent the WHOLE day today working on things to celebrate Saint Patrick's Day. Okay, except for a short break for some Minecraft (blame the seven year old, he's got me hooked!) The very first thing I did was make an origami box to hold the chocolate coin, gold marbles, and pirate treasure that I had picked up last week. I knew that was going to be the end result of my scavenger hunt... but how to get there?
Next, I traced these funky looking block letters to spell out the colours of the rainbow. I went the Roy G. Bp route to keep it simple.
On the backs of some of the letters, I wrote out words to make the question "Where can you always find a pot of gold?" when the words were put in the correct rainbow order. Once that was finished, I hid the letters all over the living room.
The housekeepers tend to look at me like I'm crazy whenever I'm running around the house setting things like this up (or dumping out the whole box of legos to dig through, or doing anything that involves paint, or playing any kind of game that requires gross motor skills), but I think they're getting used to it by now. Either that, or they don't want to put the energy into stringing together enough English, Turkish, and made-up sign language to ask me what I'm doing- which I'm grateful for, so I don't have to put the energy into coming up with my own combination of Turkish, English, and made-up sign language to be able to answer!
So I had a scavenger hunt, I had a question, and I had a pot of gold... now, how to connect them? Obviously, I needed a rainbow of some sort. I tossed around several ideas... making little rainbow cards saying "warmer" and "colder" that would send him in the right direction... coming up with some sort of string to follow around the house until it finally brought him to the treasure... each idea that came to mind sounded even more ridiculous than the last. I was just about to give up and just hand him the treasure when he finished spelling out the colours when I came up with my plan. I cut a sheet of paper in each colour of the rainbow into small strips and made each colour into it's own chain. I took the chains outside and his them in a corner of the yard, making a rainbow, and stuck the pot of gold underneath. Simple! The paper chains took absolutely ages, though, and tons of paper and staples... so I am totally open to suggestions on how to reuse them.
At the end of the rainbow, I also put a short book in which I wrote out the most common leprechaun legend. I got the text from this printable, and just wrote out each number on a different page. I had planned to illustrate it, but by this point I was running really low on time! Sadly, we didn't get a chance to read this today. I'm hoping to fit it in tomorrow, though! This was actually my third attempt at having a Saint Patrick's Day-related book. My first try was the Leprechaun Magic Treehouse book, which I bought for Kindle. Unfortunately, we have only read the very first Magic Treehouse book, and while we absolutely LOVED it, there are too many things we don't yet know about the characters in the series to be able to skip that far ahead. I had also gotten the Tomie Depaola book Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland from the WE public library (thank you, e-book lending!) but I didn't realize that it would be so history-based. I had been hoping for something more along the lines of Streganona!
I'm really quite proud of myself for my craft creation for today. I came up with it in approximately 30 seconds when I learned that Hakan would be home from school almost two hours earlier than normal, and I lost all my remaining prep time! (Okay, full disclosure: I parked him in front of a Youtube video while I finished up.) We each spent a few minutes covering a sheet of paper with clovers made from any green materials I had on hand- paper, glitter glue, pipe cleaners, and the usual assortment of crayons, pencils, markers, paint, and pens. We each kept track of how many four-leaf clovers there were on our sheet while we were drawing. When we had each finished creating our page of clovers, we traded, told each other how many four leaf clovers to look for, and started the hunt! It was simple, but a whole lot more fun than I had anticipated. I think I'm going to keep this activity on the back burner- it could be really easy to adapt to different themes!
That was the end of our Saint Patrick's Day themed activities. I had hopes to also watch the Disney Channel Original Movie Luck of the Irish, but sadly, we didn't quite get there. We spent the rest of our time today watching some Youtube videos, playing Minecraft, and much to my delight, playing marbles! When my host mom returned home from work, she even joined us in a game, and reminded me of some rules that I had forgotten since the last time I played umpteen years ago. I think next, I am going to be on the lookout for jacks!
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