We count ourselves lucky to share this learning journey with you, so we wanted to say thank you with some educational freebies for St. Patrick’s Day. The highly visual, interactive printables are designed to tap into learners’ love of cute clipart and themed learning. They’re kid-tested and approved. Check out tips and ideas for using them below, or if Spanish is more your thing, you can download the Spanish freebie version here.
Learning Focus
- Mastering high-frequency English words
- Learning or practicing common English sight words
- Developing fluency with emotions vocabulary
- Increasing personal emotional intelligence
- Identifying common emotions in others
- Letter formation
- Fine motor skills
- Improving reading and/or listening fluency
Vocabulary Covered
- Worksheets: am, happy, I, is, nervous, rainbow, sad, surprised, the
- Reader: a, am, book, can, clover, face, for, happy, I, is, mad, make, mouth, my, name, nervous, new, no, now, of, sad, shamrock, surprised, thank, the, this, with, you
Special Note on Shamrocks versus Clovers
Shamrock? Clover? What’s the difference? Colloquially, the words are often used interchangeably, but scientifically speaking, they’re different. A clover usually has three leaves but sometimes more, and a shamrock, the national plant of Ireland, has three. So, you can see why the terms are easily confused. In this pack, we included both terms because they’re often used interchangeably in speech.
You’ll also sometimes see both the shamrock and the clover used as a symbol for St. Patrick’s Day or Ireland, especially in the United States, even though they’re not technically interchangeable.
Using the two terms will hopefully allow learners to be exposed to both vocabulary words, as they’ll likely encounter both.
Reader
Pre-reading skills and language acquisition usually intersect in early or beginning readers, like this free St. Patrick’s Day reader. Beginning readers leverage repetition, simple vocabulary, and memorable themes to propel learners’ reading and language acquisition skills. Readers make quick progress, so they feel good about reading, which means they read more, creating a positive feedback loop.
Importantly, the reader contains high-frequency sight words most commonly learned and repeated in kindergarten and first-grade and in early ESL/ESOL, such as: the, now, on, you, can, this, etc.
As a bonus, the little book is designed for interaction with the reader. Shamrock “asks” questions, and, as the reader “talks” to him, she learns or reinforces feelings vocabulary, which is especially helpful for young learners and teenagers.
Worksheets and Sentence Blocks
This second set of educational freebies for St. Patrick’s Day breaks contains worksheets and manipulables that can be used in tandem with the worksheets or separately for fun sentence construction. Check the pictures below to see how they work.
Worksheets
Both language acquisition and improving emotional intelligence require interaction. These sheets are colorable (how adorable are the rainbows) and require input from the learner, who must: (1) think of how he or she appears when happy, nervous, sad, and suprised and (2) insert the correct verb to match the pronoun I or the noun the rainbow.
Although these pages work for preschool through roughly first grade, don’t hesitate to give them a try for beginning ESL/ESOL. Even some teenagers, believe it or not, like to color and trace.
Sentence Blocks
Letter, pattern, and in-context vocabulary recognition are important for early learners as they work to acquire language. Like most languages, English follows pecific sentence structures that are only inverted for special purposes. So, using blocks to manipulate words even before a learner can write and especially as writing begins assists the learner to internalize English sentence structure and patterns that carry on throughout their lives.
Have thoughts? Need More Printables?
We love hearing from our learning community about virtually anything. Have ideas we didn’t consider? Feel strongly about wearing or not wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day? Want to talk about the difference between shamrocks and clovers? We’re here for it!
Looking for more freebies? Check out more more free stuff here. We add new English, Spanish, and bilingual printables regularly.
Also Available in Spanish!
Printable Freebies for St. Patrick’s Day
