St. Patrick’s Day Memory Game for Preschoolers
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Valentine’s Day is gone and now we are getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day, another fun and different holiday, full of magic, Leprechauns, rainbows, and gold. It is also an excellent opportunity to talk about Irish culture and the history behind this holiday and have a little educational fun with this FREE St. Patrick’s Day Memory Game.
As I said before, I never used to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, but when I moved to this country I saw how important it is here, and how many Irish or Irish descendants live in America, including my beautiful nieces.
Start the month of March decorating your classroom with gold and green decorations (you can see some suggestions at the bottom of this post), but never forget to add related artwork done by your preschoolers.
St. Patrick’s Day Memory Game
This FREE St. Patrick’s Day Memory Game will bring a lot of fun to your classroom, and friendly competition among your preschoolers, and as they play they will be working on important skills that will be very useful for their integral development.
This printable includes four pages with nine cards each, for hours of entertainment and learning. Be sure to grab it at the end of the post.
A memory game like this one involves a lot of skills such as concentration, memory, one-to-one correspondence, and, most importantly visual discrimination, which is also needed to recognize letters, numbers, and patterns.
If your preschoolers have been exposed to other memory games, they are probably going to be able to work independently. However, for new students or children who are not familiar with these types of games your guidance.
How to Prepare The Memory Game
These game cards must be durable and strong, because the children will manipulate them in any kind of way, and you want them to last a long time.
Begin by printing two sets of each page using white cardstock. Then cut out and laminate each of the cards to protect them.
Once you get them ready, you might want to place the cards in a small basket, a little box, or in a Zip-lock bag, to keep them together. You don’t lose some of the cards which will result in an incomplete set.
Materials You Will Need:
As with most of my activities, you won’t need a lot of materials. I know how many preschool teachers need to stretch our budget, that is why the only materials you will need (and probably have already) are: a printer, white cardstock, scissors, laminator, laminator paper, and my FREE St. Patrick’s Day Memory Game cards, that can be found at the end of this post. That’s it!
How to Play The Game
Turn the cards face down in rows and columns, then instruct and invite a couple of your preschoolers to play. Each of the students will take turns trying to find a pair by turning in only two cards at a time. If the cards don’t match, they have to turn them back and remember where they saw them, in case they find the matching card later on.
When all the matching pairs are found, the child with the most pairs wins the game!
Extension Activities
The cards in the St. Patrick’s Day Memory game can be used for other learning games, which will save you a lot of time without having to prep for many other activities, and will benefit your kiddos as well.
Some of the uses and activities that come to mind are:
Phonological awareness game
Take one of the cards and name the picture emphasizing the beginning sound, for example: “This is a horseshoe. I hear /h/ /h/ /h/ at the beginning of the word horseshoe.
Letter recognition
Take one of the cards and name the picture saying the name of the letter that the pictures start with, for example: “This is a leprechaun. Leprechaun starts with the letter “Ll”.
Language Development
One activity that I have done with excellent results is to select one of the cards (or have a child select it) and present it to the group during circle time. Then I start a story based on the picture and invite the preschoolers to continue with the story, while you take dictation.
Then I type the story created by the children and print it out in portions using different sheets of paper, and a cover with the name of the authors. After that, I invite the rest of the students to become the illustrators and create pictures to complement the words, that way I involve the entire class in the process. You will not believe the amazing stories and books we have been able to create!
Of course, I always make several copies of the book to give to the students to take home. I laminate the original and use spiral bonding to turn it into the book for our library.
Matching Activity
The cards of this St. Patrick’s Day Memory Game can also be used for matching activities. For this case, you will need two sets of cards, so children can match pairs creating matching sets. This activity involves concentration and focus, and it is also great to develop your preschooler’s one-to-one correspondence and visual discrimination skills.
Artwork
This is an activity that I love because it involves creativity, free will, imagination, and fine motor development. Sometimes I invite the children to select a card and get inspired to create their artwork, but most of the time I just display them on the walls and let give them the freedom to choose one as an inspiration to draw or paint a picture.
The “Missing Card” Game
This game is better as a small group activity. Take 3 to 5 cards and place them on a table. Ask your preschoolers to name the pictures on each card, then have your children close their eyes while you remove one card. Ask your preschoolers to open their eyes and tell you which card is missing.
Patterns Creation
If you make several copies of these cards, you can also use them as pattern cards to follow the pattern. The children will pick the same cards out and place them in a specific pattern or create their own. They can play along or with a friend copying each other’s patterns.
Literacy
Literacy development is one of the most important parts of your preschooler’s overall development because it will create the foundation to make decisions, develop good relationships, learn how to become independent, and do well at school in general.
The activities related to literacy are many since they involve singing, writing, talking, playing rhyming, and word games among others, but for me, one of the most important ones is reading, because this activity develops your children’s vocabulary, the ability to pay attention to listen and understand what is being read, to connect sounds and words, to develop pre-writing skills, and to learn about the world around them.
These are some of the books that I like to use for the St. Patrick’s Day celebration. You can find some at your local library, used book store, and on Amazon. If you want to add some to your collection, just click on the titles and my affiliate links will take you to the right page in seconds.
- How to Catch a Leprechaun by Adam Wallace. Start a St. Patrick’s Day tradition with this fun and lively children’s picture book and get inspired to build leprechaun traps of your own at home or in the classroom!
- Ten Lucky Leprechauns by Kathryn Heling. Count from one to ten as one little leprechaun looking for treasure magically becomes ten silly leprechaun friends at the end of the rainbow.
- The Night Before St. Patrick’s Day by Natasha Wing. It’s the night before St. Patrick’s Day, and Tim and Maureen are wide awake setting traps to catch a leprechaun! When they wake the next morning, they’re shocked to find that they’ve caught a leprechaun. But, will they find his pot of gold?
- The Secret Life of the Leprechauns by Luna James. A fun and silly picture book that allows children to enter the life of the leprechauns.
- The Berenstain Bears’ St. Patrick’s Day by Mike Berenstain. Join Papa, Mama, and the cubs as Gramps introduces them to some of the traditions most associated with the holiday, from gathering to enjoy a parade down Main Street to leprechauns and pots of gold.
- There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover! by Lucille Colandro. It’s spring and the Old Lady is swallowing a clover, a butterfly, a daisy, and more! Herald spring with this joyful story, full of bouncy rhymes and bright art!
Pin It for Later
If you don’t have time to download the printable right away, just pin it to your St. Patrick, Math, or any other Pinterest board, and come back to it later.
Every holiday has an incredible amount of resources that you can take advantage of and use to make every day in your classroom a fun and learning experience that your kiddos will love to go to. Simply don’t forget to tie this holiday or any other theme you might be using with different standards (Math, Science, Literacy, Art, etc.), to make the learning process more cohesive and complete.
Don’t forget to download your FREE St. Patrick’s Day Memory Game. Just enter your email address in the box to confirm the subscription, and the PDF file will open instantly for you to print and save.
I hope you find this resource useful for your classroom and don’t forget to check the other related activities at the bottom of this post. You can set up different stations in the different centers using these activities, and have your children rotate through them. Most importantly, have fun. That will feed your kiddos’ excitement and their learning process will be more effective.
Be happy, safe, and creative. I wish you well.
Love,
P.S. If you would like to see an article about how to make something specific, please let me know and I will try my best to write it for you. My goal is to help you in any way I can and I don’t like anything better than to post something that you might find useful.
