Paper Plate Leprechaun

Do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with your kids or students? I don’t remember doing much, if anything, for St. Patrick’s Day growing up, but that is being made up for now! My kids like to celebrate every holiday, big and small, with festive food, decor, crafts, and activities! We are getting an early start on our St. Patrick’s Day projects with this Paper Plate Leprechaun Kid Craft.

We are combining two of our favorite crafting items, paper plates and tissue paper, again to create this leprechaun kid craft. We used both of these items to create a Tissue Paper Heart for Valentine’s Day a few weeks ago. They are inexpensive, readily available, and easy for young kids to use.

Supplies:

• Paper plate
• Orange tissue paper
• Light cream/tan colored paint & paint brush (We had latte colored acrylic on hand & used that.)
• Leprechaun Hat template
• Scissors
• Glue stick
• Googly eyes
• Green, black, and yellow card stock or construction paper
• Black marker

Directions:

1. Flip the plate over and apply a light coat of paint to the backside of the paper plate and allow to dry. Ours dried within a few minutes.

2. Tear or cut the tissue paper into small pieces. We did not measure ours and every piece was slightly different in size, but you want it to be about the be the length of the the outside rim of the plate. Our pieces were approximately 2″ squares.

3. Using the glue stick apply, apply glue to the outside rim of the paper plate, working in small sections. Fold the tissue paper slightly and apply to the glue. You want it to look almost like a small accordion fold. Continue to apply the tissue paper around the rim of the paper plate covering about 3/4 of the outside rim.

4. Print the template for the leprechaun’s hat and use green paper to make the hat, a black piece for the belt and a yellow for the buckle. After gluing all those pieces together, glue the hat to the top of the leprechaun’s head (where you have not applied tissue paper).

5. Using the glue stick, glue the googly eyes to the plate and use the black marker to draw the nose and mouth.

One of the great things about these types of crafts is that each child’s comes out so unique and different! While there are instructions, it is great to also just give your kids the supplies and see how they create their unique paper plate leprechaun!

More St. Patrick’s Day Fun

Looking for more fun learning activities this St. Patrick’s Day? Have some sensory filled fun with our rainbow play dough kit or rainbow rice sensory bin!  For some printable learning fun grab our pot of gold number mats or rainbow alphabet match! 

For an entire month of March themed learning, grab our March printables pack! It is packed with 91 pages of themed math and literacy fun.