St. Patty's Day! And a unit study on rainbows

Happy St. Patrick's day!

First of all, we had a visitor this morning.
Levi was shocked to see what the leprechauns had done in our house - foot prints everywhere, shamrocks drawn on the wall,  flour spilled, water turned green, a message on the window and even green water in the toilet!   He also found a treat of golden nuggets.  

Yesterday, we did a quick unit study on rainbows, and St. Patrick's day. 

 It was a beautiful day, so I brought his work table outside.  We did some rainbow coloring, and work with the dot markers (we have shiny ones)

 

Next we made some red juice, with our new juicer.  This one is beets and carrots.

 

 He wasn't too impressed.  

For clean up, we played with the hose and watched how the water made rainbows in the air.  We had discussed how rainbows are made, with water bending light.  
Another demo we did was to take a glass of water, and put it on a piece of white paper in the sunlight.  The light shines through and makes a rainbow on the paper. 

 

On the front, we have a rainbow we cut out of a magazine, the dot marker rainbow made using a fruit-loops printable, and Levi's drawing of how rainbows are made:  sun + rain = rainbow

The back has the St. Patty's day stuff - "If I had a pot of gold", Levi drew a monster truck, and a drawing of the engine.    Next is a mini-book containing St. Patrick's day vocabulary words which Levi had to copy.   And last is a color-by-number page.  Levi usually doesn't like to color, so this was a pretty good attempt from him. 

And this is the inside.  Some of the printables are from here.    There is a set of layer books which contain songs about how to spell each color.  On the right is a ROYGBIV sheet which Levi colored.  I made a pocket for the color words underneith so he could match them up. 

We also made a color wheel by mixing paint, and discussed primary and secondary colors.  Under that is some flowers which he colored using complimentary colors. 

We also made some St. Patrick's day play doh:

Basic play doh:

2 cups of water (add food coloring if desired)
2 cups of flour
1 cup salt
2 TBS oil
1 tsp cream of tarter

Cook over medium heat until it looks like play doh, let it cool and then kneed it until smooth. 
You can also add food coloring, fragrances, glitter, etc.   For this one, I added a drop of green coloring, some peppermint extract, and some gold glitter.  

For dinner, I kept it simple by adding whatever I could find in the fridge that was green and adding it to some potatoes.  A little olive oil, some herbs from the garden, and salt and pepper.  Then added broccoli, zucchini, and spinach. 

And last, for desert we made some vegan peppermint patty's.  I used a recipe for reference, but modified it a bit.  I used honey instead of Agave (just because I didn't have any agave on hand), and added some shredded coconut.  I also tripled the amount of mint, but I think it could have used even more.   For the chocolate, I used vegan semi-sweet chocolate chips, but added a square of unsweetened baking chocolate for more of a bitter-sweet flavor. 

Busy day today, but lots of fun!   Tomorrow we plan on going to the Strawberry festival.