Musical Shamrocks

This may, quite possibly, be my most favorite activity that we've done, to date.

I saw the idea when I was researching Valentine's day activities on No Time For Flashcards. I loved the game but wanted to use it for St. Patty's, so I just substituted shamrock shapes for the hearts that she used.

Here's the gist of it. You put cut-outs of shapes, like a heart or shamrock or anything else you want, on the floor in a circle. Each shape has an action, movement, or direction on it. The kids take their places on the shapes and walk around while music plays. When the music stops, they stop and perform the action on whatever shape they happen to be standing on. It's like musical chairs, sort of, and a cake walk, sort of. Mostly it's just really fun.

We had a ball with this one! We played for about an hour. Then we played for about another hour when daddy got home because the kids were so excited to introduce him to the game too :-) Love it!

You can be creative and use whatever actions you want for the shapes. Here's what I came up with:

And here are some tips from what my kids liked the best:

• they liked singing the music themselves, and whenever it was their turn to sing the song while we circled around they were ecstatic because it meant they got to stop themselves on their favorite thing to do, which was always (for both of them) the "10 punches" station.
• it was a good activity to help teach numbers as completing the directions usually meant having to repeat some action a certain number of times, great reinforcement. 
• they were really happy about the pictures on the shamrocks and loved trying to guess or remember what they were supposed to do by looking at the pictures. 
• they appreciated taking turns to complete the action when the music stopped. We tried doing all of our actions all at the same, but the kids really enjoyed "performing" and having the rest of us watch while they did whatever they were supposed to. I liked it better that way too because it gave us an opportunity to do funny things that we would all laugh at together. For example, every time I got on "head, shoulders, knees and toes" I would purposefully get one of them wrong. The kids loved to catch me at it and would laugh uproariously at the mix-up. Pretty soon they started mixing things up too which led to even more laughs. Fun stuff.

It's a good activity. I like these ones that get us moving and learning and laughing all at the same time.