Tuesday, April 1, 2014

St. Patricks Day Homeschool Projects

Yes, St. Patrick's Day was two weeks ago. But I've had my moms birthday present sitting in my garage since August and still haven't sent out all of my Christmas cards so realistically I'm doing pretty well posting this within two weeks.

We are not Irish in any way, shape, or form. If I had to make up our family ancestry it'd be more like
1/4 Peruvian
1/4 German
1/2 British (note, this is different than simply "English")
Yep, no Irish

But St. Paddy's Day is a big day for us. Well, for me and the children it is. I think it's mostly because I love the color green, mostly because I love a good potato, and mostly because I love Irish literature. Mostly.
So every St. Patrick's Day we have our beer pot-roast, Irish soda bread, and boiled potatoes with a lovely chocolate stout cake (recipes here), and fill the day with activities, stories, and movies about dear Ireland.


The children and I cut out various heart shapes and glued them together to make four leaf clovers. Some we punch holes through and wrapped pipe cleaners through. I put them in a vase to make a faux clover bouquet. The rest we gave away to residents at my grandma's retirement community.


We also did one of the coolest experiments I've ever seen. I was absolutely floored by this. Most experiments we do are either anti-climatic or don't work as promised but this did both!


We started with three jars full of water. In one we put red food coloring, another yellow, and another blue. You know, the primary colors. Then we took a sheet of bounty paper towel, folded it, and put one end in the red water. Then we took an empty glass and folded the other end into it. We repeated with the blue and yellow, and continued until we had a circle of alternating water filled and empty jars with paper towels connecting each. (See full, and better, instructions here)


Then guess what happened?!? The colored water literally CLIMBED up the paper towel and filled up the empty jar. Because there were two colors going into each jar the colors would blend and we ended up with a full color wheel of colored water.


It took an entire day for all the water to finish but it was still really amazing to water.
I'm not sure how "Irish" rainbows are but it was still a fun experiments to complete. I don't know what experiment would be more Irish except for cooking a baby (Swift anyone?) but...yeah we're not doing that.

So we ate
did a craft
did an experiment

and finished our day with that wonderful classic, The Secret of Roan Inish



We've got to get Jimmy!!

Hope you have as wonderful of a day as we did!




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