Today We Are Leprechauns (Part 2)

I hope you have had a chance to read about my students' adventures with the book "How to Catch a Leprechaun" by Adam Wallace and Andy Elkerton. Today I'll tell you about our third and final STEM activity. My students continued to be leprechauns for this activity. We began by talking about the tricky things that leprechauns do to humans. Some of the children have experienced a leprechaun visiting their home at night (thank you Pinterest for your many ideas). But some ideas were listed right in the book. We talked about how messy glitter is, and how the leprechaun likes to throw glitter in people's hair. We decided that leprechauns need a glitter delivery system to help them with this task.

This time the students were instructed that they would go outside to deliver the glitter. I didn't want that mess in my room. The would need to create a container that could travel down a string to the target on the ground. They would need to find a way to drop the glitter from the container onto the target. The team that got the most glitter onto the target would win.

So the children were given paper to design their delivery system. They would once again go to the leprechaun store to buy supplies. And they had $10 to spend on materials. We reminded them that they would probably need to purchase some yarn or string so they could pull on their container to drop the glitter.

The students worked hard on their designs. We had quite a variety of containers. One group tried to design a trap door that they could pull on to drop the glitter. Another group planned to tip over their container by pulling on a string attached to the bottom. But we discovered a problem I didn't plan for....wind. I gave each team a different color of ultra fine glitter which is what I happened to have on hand. The wind blew it everywhere except on the paper target.

I would suggest that you use heavier glitter, and have your string low to the ground so that the glitter doesn't have far too fall. We will be trying this again soon to see if that helps.

If you like this activity, you can head over to my Teachers Pay Teachers store, Under One Roof to purchase the literature unit for the book. It includes three different STEM activities. You can also come back to read the posts about our other days of Leprechaun STEM.