St Patrick’s Day is Monday, 17th March. It’s our national day here in Ireland. It’s a weekend of fun and frolics and a celebration of all things Irish. It also means a day off school and work!

In preparation for the weekend ahead we’ve been having a little fun with some St Patrick’s Day themed activities. Today’s fun included exploring with green home-made play dough and very messy outdoor antics with gloop!

First thing on the agenda was to make the play dough. Usually I let the children make it themselves but we were a little short on time today as we had a trip to the library scheduled, so I whipped it up in my food processor using the dough making attachment – takes less than a minute!!!

Our Play Dough Recipe:

1 cup flour

1 cup salt

1/2 cup water

Few drops of green paint or food colouring.

• Simply mix the flour, salt, water and food die together to form a dough.
• I try to leave mine in the fridge for an hour or two before playing with it to firm it up a little.
• Usually Doodles and Oodles make it themselves, mixing it in a bowl with a wooden spoon.

We had great fun rolling and kneading the dough.  D and O love to use cookie cutters to cut out shapes.

Legend has it that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland (there are no snakes found in the wild in this country), so we modeled some snakes and our own little St Patrick, mind you I think he was  more reminiscent of a leprechaun!!!

We also fashioned some shamrocks from the dough.  We then added a tiny hole to each using a straw. They were then popped into the oven at 140 degrees Celsius for about 90 minutes until they were fully dried.  We then added some ribbon and hung them on our all-purpose decorative tree (you’ll see us decorating this for every occasion!)

This is a really simple and fun activity to keep little hands busy.  It can be easily adapted for any season.  We have made lots of Christmas decorations in a similar way.

Hope you have fun with this activity!  Let us know how you got on!