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St. Patrick's Day STEM Classroom Activities

Seasonal STEM is a great way to introduce your students to the engineering process in a fun way. St. Patrick’s day leprechaun mischief and rainbow science activities are some of the absolute best to capture the interest of your kiddos and engage them in hands-on STEM experiences. Whether you’re doing STEM at home or school, check out a few of my favorites below that work for nearly every grade level, and with minimal expense and effort to implement!

Rainbow Round-Up:

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day means rainbow fun galore! Set the stage and build background knowledge by exploring colors, light, and color mixing. These color paddles and color mixing lenses by Learning Resources are perfect for rainbow play and exploration. Let your students experiment with shining light through individual colors and also play with color mixing by overlapping primary color paddles to make secondary colors. After that warm-up, transition from color mixing to into rainbow fun with one of my favorite, simple activities for this time of year. The best milk color changing experiment I have found is from Spangler Science (here). Watch the video and follow the detailed, yet simple instructions to have your littles mixing colors like St. Patrick’s Day experts! My students loved this activity so much, as did their parents during our family STEM night. 

Leprechaun Tracks Green Goo:

In my classroom and at home with my own son, we always talk about how leprechauns leave tracks and a trail wherever they go. Sometimes I use a footprint stamp and washable green ink to stamp out his path and the kids LOVE it! Kick this up a notch by then having your children/students create Leprechaun GOO! We all know slime/goo is all the rage, and so if you can’t been them...join them. Watch this step-by-step instructional video from Steve Spangler Science (what I used in my classroom) to see how to create your own green goo that the kiddos will love. 

 

TEACHER TESTED TIPS:

 
  1. Purchase dollar store plastic tablecloths to cover your experiment surfaces.
  2. Have students wear oversized shirts or smocks while making the goo.
  3. Provide plastic food service gloves to protect hands from goop and food coloring.
  4. Use foil baking/roasting pans to prevent messy splatters during mixing.

Lucky Charms Screen-Free Coding:

Check out this amazing, yet simple St. Patrick’s Day screen-free coding activity from early childhood STEM guru, Brooke Brown, of Teach Oustide the Box. For just $2.00, this simple St. Patrick’s Day themed introduction to block-style coding is perfect for Kindergarten through third graders as they learn the basics of “unplugged” programming without computers. After completing activities such as these on paper, they can apply similar block coding strategies to coding websites and apps for kids such as code.org and Kodable, and eventually to more advanced languages of coding. To allow students to be most successful, please MODEL and clearly discuss directions for this activity before they complete it with partners. Grab some Lucky Charms and get ready to go for the (leprechaun) gold!
 

LIFE-SIZED TIP:

Use the Reversable Graph It Mat by Learning Resources and sorting manipulatives, clipart, or paper cutouts to create your own super-sized version of this screen-free coding activity. You might want to use this as a warm-up and then transition to the activity above from Teach Outside the Box.

Leprechaun Trap STEM Challenge:

Perhaps the most common spring holiday STEM Challenge is to have your students/children create a leprechaun trap using the engineering design process. This is a great activity to leave open-ended to allow for maximum maker-creativity and end products. If you would like some amazing inspiration, check out the plethora of ideas on this post to get you started. From trap design to clever bait, you’ll have plenty to choose from to get you started. The best part? Almost everything you need can be found around the house. If you want to supercharge your leprechaun trap construction, try weaving this gears set by Learning Resources into your engineering design plan and process. They will add a level of complexity and fun to your con-TRAP-tions! 
Luck-o-the-Irish to you as you enjoy exploring these awesome seasonal hands-on STEM activities with your own little leprechauns!
 
St. Patrick's Day STEM Classroom Activities!
St. Patrick's Day STEM Classroom Activities
Seasonal STEM is a great way to introduce your students to the engineering process in a fun way. St. Patrick’s day leprechaun mischief and rainbow science activities are some of the absolute best to capture the interest of your kiddos and engage them in hands-on STEM experiences. Whether you’re doing STEM at home or school, check out a few of my favorites below that work for nearly every grade level, and with minimal expense and effort to implement!

Rainbow Round-Up:

Celebrating St. Patrick’s Day means rainbow fun galore! Set the stage and build background knowledge by exploring colors, light, and color mixing. These color paddles and color mixing lenses by Learning Resources are perfect for rainbow play and exploration. Let your students experiment with shining light through individual colors and also play with color mixing by overlapping primary color paddles to make secondary colors. After that warm-up, transition from color mixing to into rainbow fun with one of my favorite, simple activities for this time of year. The best milk color changing experiment I have found is from Spangler Science (here). Watch the video and follow the detailed, yet simple instructions to have your littles mixing colors like St. Patrick’s Day experts! My students loved this activity so much, as did their parents during our family STEM night. 

Leprechaun Tracks Green Goo:

In my classroom and at home with my own son, we always talk about how leprechauns leave tracks and a trail wherever they go. Sometimes I use a footprint stamp and washable green ink to stamp out his path and the kids LOVE it! Kick this up a notch by then having your children/students create Leprechaun GOO! We all know slime/goo is all the rage, and so if you can’t been them...join them. Watch this step-by-step instructional video from Steve Spangler Science (what I used in my classroom) to see how to create your own green goo that the kiddos will love. 

 

TEACHER TESTED TIPS:

 
  1. Purchase dollar store plastic tablecloths to cover your experiment surfaces.
  2. Have students wear oversized shirts or smocks while making the goo.
  3. Provide plastic food service gloves to protect hands from goop and food coloring.
  4. Use foil baking/roasting pans to prevent messy splatters during mixing.

Lucky Charms Screen-Free Coding:

Check out this amazing, yet simple St. Patrick’s Day screen-free coding activity from early childhood STEM guru, Brooke Brown, of Teach Oustide the Box. For just $2.00, this simple St. Patrick’s Day themed introduction to block-style coding is perfect for Kindergarten through third graders as they learn the basics of “unplugged” programming without computers. After completing activities such as these on paper, they can apply similar block coding strategies to coding websites and apps for kids such as code.org and Kodable, and eventually to more advanced languages of coding. To allow students to be most successful, please MODEL and clearly discuss directions for this activity before they complete it with partners. Grab some Lucky Charms and get ready to go for the (leprechaun) gold!
 

LIFE-SIZED TIP:

Use the Reversable Graph It Mat by Learning Resources and sorting manipulatives, clipart, or paper cutouts to create your own super-sized version of this screen-free coding activity. You might want to use this as a warm-up and then transition to the activity above from Teach Outside the Box.

Leprechaun Trap STEM Challenge:

Perhaps the most common spring holiday STEM Challenge is to have your students/children create a leprechaun trap using the engineering design process. This is a great activity to leave open-ended to allow for maximum maker-creativity and end products. If you would like some amazing inspiration, check out the plethora of ideas on this post to get you started. From trap design to clever bait, you’ll have plenty to choose from to get you started. The best part? Almost everything you need can be found around the house. If you want to supercharge your leprechaun trap construction, try weaving this gears set by Learning Resources into your engineering design plan and process. They will add a level of complexity and fun to your con-TRAP-tions! 
Luck-o-the-Irish to you as you enjoy exploring these awesome seasonal hands-on STEM activities with your own little leprechauns!
 
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The Busbys' 6 Simple and Fun Coding Activities for Kids!

Right now it seems everyone is talking about the benefits of exposing kids to STEM and Coding.  I hope to give my 6 girls every opportunity possible, and spark their curiosity and passion.  I like teaching them to understand a path of thinking that will help them learn. And that’s what these fun activities will do!If you don’t know where to start, are your kids out of luck? Not at all!  Here are some tips to start with easy activities around the house:

  1. BEE-autiful Colors and Coding

One of the quints’ favorite activities is coloring. With a little tweak, coloring can become a terrific coding activity. The key is to get the kids to color by number. Remember the fun of that? There are lots of color-by-number activities online or you can just DIY with your childs’ favorite coloring book. When you assign a specific number to a color, and have your child color a picture based on the number sequence, they are actually learning early coding skills!Hex heart complete

  1. Coding in the Kitchen

Sequential thinking is key to coding. This may sound a bit intimidating, but it’s actually as simple as following the steps of a recipe for cupcakes. When I am in the kitchen cooking or baking, the quints are always interested in ‘What is Mommy doing’. Even though cooking with the quints always makes for a huge mess, I love seeing their little minds work. I get them thinking by asking silly questions. I might finish mixing the dough and while it’s still raw and in the bowl ask, “Should I put the frosting on now?” I get a lot of giggles and get the girls thinking about the right order for the task at hand.

  1. Coding with Clothes

“Sorting and ordering” is a basic concept of coding, and in our house there’s always a pile of laundry to sort. The quints actually love to help with laundry, lets just hope this lasts till they are teenagers! Since they have a fair amount of matching outfits, I pick out one of the outfits, lay it down on the floor and have the girls add the matching outfit to the pile for me to fold. If items match, they go in one pile. Otherwise, the girls continue to search and sort. We also change things up and ask the girls to sort clothes by color or type, such as tops and bottoms. To the quints, sorting laundry is a fun game, they have no idea how much they are actually helping me!organizing socks

  1. Busby Queen Bee

One thing we try to do daily is let the kids burn some energy, in hope that they all take a good long nap. We’ll set up a little obstacle course using the couch, pillows and toys. Then we let Blayke navigate one of her sisters or me around the room with simple “commands” like “walk forward 2 steps” and “turn right.” The girls may not like to listen all the time, but when it is in a ‘game form’ they get a kick out of trying to follow the rules correctly.

  1. If I say “Buzz,” Then You Say “Bee”!

When we want to get all the girls involved at once, we get up on our feet and play a little “If-Then” game. Again, this is a computer programming basic concept, brought into our own playroom. Our little Queen Bee will shout a statement and everyone else must listen, and then act. Blayke loves saying, “If I say Buzz, then you say Bee! Buzz!” and all the girls shout back “Bee!” The quints will often say, “If I jump, then you jump!” and that’s ok too, but when Adam and I get a turn we try to mix things up. “If I point up, then you jump.”

  1. Busbys Meet Botley

The girls love animals and have asked for a pet for quite a while now. As a Mom of six, I’m sure you can guess that I don’t prefer to take care of pet right now. So I got the next best thing, Botley! Botley is a coding robot from Learning Resources. What better “pet” to have than a robot. He teaches coding in a really fun, friendly way the girls love. Blayke has been doing most of the coding with him, though all the girls love to see him in action, completing obstacle courses, and making funny sounds.botley classroom codingThe great thing about coding with small children is they learn to think like programmers naturally and easily, even without sitting in front of a screen.Check out more easy to do coding activities here!
The Busbys' 6 Simple and Fun Coding Activities for Kids! Right now it seems everyone is talking about the benefits of exposing kids to STEM and Coding.  I hope to give my 6 girls every opportunity possible, and spark their curiosity and passion.  I like teaching them to understand a path of thinking that will help them learn. And that’s what these fun activities will do!If you don’t know where to start, are your kids out of luck? Not at all!  Here are some tips to start with easy activities around the house:

  1. BEE-autiful Colors and Coding

One of the quints’ favorite activities is coloring. With a little tweak, coloring can become a terrific coding activity. The key is to get the kids to color by number. Remember the fun of that? There are lots of color-by-number activities online or you can just DIY with your childs’ favorite coloring book. When you assign a specific number to a color, and have your child color a picture based on the number sequence, they are actually learning early coding skills!Hex heart complete

  1. Coding in the Kitchen

Sequential thinking is key to coding. This may sound a bit intimidating, but it’s actually as simple as following the steps of a recipe for cupcakes. When I am in the kitchen cooking or baking, the quints are always interested in ‘What is Mommy doing’. Even though cooking with the quints always makes for a huge mess, I love seeing their little minds work. I get them thinking by asking silly questions. I might finish mixing the dough and while it’s still raw and in the bowl ask, “Should I put the frosting on now?” I get a lot of giggles and get the girls thinking about the right order for the task at hand.

  1. Coding with Clothes

“Sorting and ordering” is a basic concept of coding, and in our house there’s always a pile of laundry to sort. The quints actually love to help with laundry, lets just hope this lasts till they are teenagers! Since they have a fair amount of matching outfits, I pick out one of the outfits, lay it down on the floor and have the girls add the matching outfit to the pile for me to fold. If items match, they go in one pile. Otherwise, the girls continue to search and sort. We also change things up and ask the girls to sort clothes by color or type, such as tops and bottoms. To the quints, sorting laundry is a fun game, they have no idea how much they are actually helping me!organizing socks

  1. Busby Queen Bee

One thing we try to do daily is let the kids burn some energy, in hope that they all take a good long nap. We’ll set up a little obstacle course using the couch, pillows and toys. Then we let Blayke navigate one of her sisters or me around the room with simple “commands” like “walk forward 2 steps” and “turn right.” The girls may not like to listen all the time, but when it is in a ‘game form’ they get a kick out of trying to follow the rules correctly.

  1. If I say “Buzz,” Then You Say “Bee”!

When we want to get all the girls involved at once, we get up on our feet and play a little “If-Then” game. Again, this is a computer programming basic concept, brought into our own playroom. Our little Queen Bee will shout a statement and everyone else must listen, and then act. Blayke loves saying, “If I say Buzz, then you say Bee! Buzz!” and all the girls shout back “Bee!” The quints will often say, “If I jump, then you jump!” and that’s ok too, but when Adam and I get a turn we try to mix things up. “If I point up, then you jump.”

  1. Busbys Meet Botley

The girls love animals and have asked for a pet for quite a while now. As a Mom of six, I’m sure you can guess that I don’t prefer to take care of pet right now. So I got the next best thing, Botley! Botley is a coding robot from Learning Resources. What better “pet” to have than a robot. He teaches coding in a really fun, friendly way the girls love. Blayke has been doing most of the coding with him, though all the girls love to see him in action, completing obstacle courses, and making funny sounds.botley classroom codingThe great thing about coding with small children is they learn to think like programmers naturally and easily, even without sitting in front of a screen.Check out more easy to do coding activities here! READ MORE

Teach Botley How to Subtract

Discover the possibilities Botley brings to your early coding curriculum.  Aligned to CSTA standards, these printable classroom activities will help your little learners discover coding without any screens or apps. Just power on Botley, and you’re ready to go!

Click here to download your botley classroom coding activity

Botley is bringing subtraction to a new dimension as students learn how to sequence while building on early math skills. 

Share your classroom coding success with us on social media using #Botley!

Teach Botley How to Subtract

Discover the possibilities Botley brings to your early coding curriculum.  Aligned to CSTA standards, these printable classroom activities will help your little learners discover coding without any screens or apps. Just power on Botley, and you’re ready to go!

Click here to download your botley classroom coding activity

Botley is bringing subtraction to a new dimension as students learn how to sequence while building on early math skills. 

Share your classroom coding success with us on social media using #Botley!

 READ MORE

Teach Botley How to Add

Discover the possibilities Botley brings to your early coding curriculum.  Aligned to CSTA standards, these printable classroom activities will help your little learners discover coding without any screens or apps. Just power on Botley, and you’re ready to go!

 

Click here to download your botley classroom coding activity

Botley combines coding sequences with hands-on math in this interactive early coding activity designed to engage multiple learning styles.Share your classroom coding success with us on social media using #Botley!
Teach Botley How to Add
Discover the possibilities Botley brings to your early coding curriculum.  Aligned to CSTA standards, these printable classroom activities will help your little learners discover coding without any screens or apps. Just power on Botley, and you’re ready to go!

 

Click here to download your botley classroom coding activity

Botley combines coding sequences with hands-on math in this interactive early coding activity designed to engage multiple learning styles.Share your classroom coding success with us on social media using #Botley!
 READ MORE

Teach Botley to Draw a Shape

Discover the possibilities Botley brings to your early coding curriculum.  Aligned to CSTA standards, these printable classroom activities will help your little learners discover coding without any screens or apps. Just power on Botley, and you’re ready to go!

Click here to download your botley classroom coding activity

Introduce sequences, loops and debugging to early coders by programming Botley to follow basic shape paths.  Now, that’s a path to 21st Century success!Botley Code TeacherShare your classroom coding success with us on social media using #Botley!
Teach Botley to Draw a Shape
Discover the possibilities Botley brings to your early coding curriculum.  Aligned to CSTA standards, these printable classroom activities will help your little learners discover coding without any screens or apps. Just power on Botley, and you’re ready to go!

Click here to download your botley classroom coding activity

Introduce sequences, loops and debugging to early coders by programming Botley to follow basic shape paths.  Now, that’s a path to 21st Century success!Botley Code TeacherShare your classroom coding success with us on social media using #Botley!
 READ MORE
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