This simple St. Patrick's Day activity for kids is perfect boredom buster for boys. It requires so little prep that you could set up this activity in probably less than a minute.
I know some people have strong feelings against letting their kids play with toy guns, but we have explained to our kids numerous times that Nerf guns are only used to shoot at targets, never at people. This simple reminder seems effective for our family. Regardless, this activity is great for working on hand strength (by squeezing the trigger of the Nerf gun), fine motor skills (loading up the ammo into the cartridges), and visual skills (aiming for a specific target and trying to hit it). You can also add a variety of learning opportunities to it, which I discuss below, to target a specific learning objectives.
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St. Patrick's Day Activity for Kids
For this activity, we used:
- Foam shamrocks
- Water or tape depending on what surface you're adhering the shamrocks to
- Nerf gun
If you want to sneak in some learning with this activity, you could write any of the following suggestions on the foam shamrocks:
- Sight words
- Simple math problems like addition or subtraction
- Numbers to practice number recognition or counting (just shoot the shamrock the corresponding number of times)
- Letters to practice letter recognition
I went with plain shamrocks simply because I wanted a quick and easy activity to pull four year old away from the screen. He's a bit addicted to TV and tablets after a long winter. So I simply let him just shoot at the different targets, which he loved. He was really into this activity and played with it all afternoon!
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