Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I figured I'd just make a separate post for this day since it was a unique day for us.  The boys both wanted to build leprechaun traps like we did last year (and maybe the year before?).  However, the weekend leading up to St. Patrick's Day was SO busy that we almost forgot to build them, and I will have to admit, they were pretty lazy about it.  It wasn't until bedtime that they all of a sudden decided to start kicking it up a few notches and adding food and tea for the leprechaun to drink, a bed for him to sleep on, etc.  They put a LOT more thought to the inside of their trap than the outside.  The outsides of their traps looked like no effort whatsoever had gone into their planning!

Hayden, surrounded by possibilities to decorate this big cardboard box in order
to trap the leprechaun, explains how the leprechaun is going to climb up a ladder
to get the pot of fake gold and fall through the top.

Sawyer doesn't even bother decorating.  He's got this whole drop system planned out.  The pot of "gold" (located on the ground) will have a string attached to it, with the other end of the string attached to a blue dump truck (hidden by Sparky).  When the leprechaun grabs the pot of gold,  it will activate the bed on the truck to lift.  The box above is also attached to the same truck bed.  When the bed lifts, the box will drop down, capturing the leprechaun.

Here, the boys are now starting to get more into the luring part of the trap.
They are finding more and more "stuff" that will attract said leprechaun.

Needless to say, the traps did not work.  The leprechaun escaped yet again (blast that little man!), but he left a scavenger hunt for the boys to follow.  I was going to take pictures, but since Hayden is now fully capable of reading on his own, those little boogers went through the entire hunt before we even woke up the next day!!

Helping the leprechaun find the pot of gold through the maze.

The two books we read for the day.  The first one was a little too preachy for me,  but I just went with it.  The boys didn't really notice or care.  The second one is a Magic Tree House book and is a chapter book.  We didn't finish it, but we are kind of still working on it.  It's hard for us to really get into because it's so far down the road from where we are with these books.  We are on book #17, and this one is book #43.  A LOT has happened between the two.  So,
we might just shelve this one and come back to it later.

Looking for Ireland and its flag.  This will be helpful for when we eventually study the whole country of Ireland.

Shamrock Dot-to-Dot.

Graphing a rainbow of Skittles!
First, the boys estimated how many of each color they had.

Then they sorted and counted out each color to see how close they were.

After that, we added up the total amount of both boys' Skittles.
(Hayden did the math for us on the chalkboard).

The finished graphs!