The Easy and Cute Shamrock Craft for Preschoolers and Toddlers
Check out this fun and easy shamrock craft that is perfect for toddlers, preschoolers, kindergarteners, and kids of all ages! This simple shamrock craft is a fun way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with your young child.
Try this Fun Shamrock Craft
If you’re looking for easy crafts that are simple enough for little hands, but, also fun enough for older kids, you’ve come to the right place! These fun shamrock crafts are also easy and cheap to make. My two year old (who just started coloring) had a blast, and the shamrocks came out super cute.
What You’ll Need
First, gather all your craft supplies. This fun craft requires relatively low prep, and you may have what you need at home already. Here’s everything we used:
- Green and yellow washable markers
- Coffee filters
- Spray bottle with water (or these pipettes)
- Plastic tray or cookie sheet
- Green construction paper
Start with Coloring
Next, have your child color a coffee filter with the green and yellow markers. Your child will have lots of fun scribbling up the entire coffee filter. There’s really no way to mess up this fun St. Patrick’s Day craft.
The more color the better for the next step, but we recommend never telling your child they have to color a certain way or in a certain place. Let them color in their own creative way. If they don’t add a lot of color or they need a little help, you can add some scribbles yourself later.
Coffee filters are as thin as tissue paper, so the marker will bleed through. These are washable markers, but we still put a piece of scrap paper under the filter.
My son colored a bunch of coffee filters, but you can do as many as you want.
Just Add Water!
Once your child is all done coloring, place one to three coffee filters on the plastic tray or cookie sheet. They can be slightly overlapping but not perfectly stacked on top of each other.
Then, have your child help you spray the coffee filters with the spray bottle. Using a spray bottle is a fun activity for kids and also great for fine motor skills. This is the part my son definitely had the most fun with.
Make sure there’s enough water to complete saturate each coffee filter. If you do more than one at a time, the ink will bleed together, but a lot of times that helps.
If you decide to use the pipettes instead of the spray bottle, your child will probably need help if they’ve never used them before. But this is an even better way to encourage fine motor skills! And once they get the hang of it, children have so much fun using the pipettes.
Cutting Out the Shamrock Shape
Next, you’ll cut out the shamrocks once the coffee filter is completely dry. This usually takes overnight, at least. You can free hand cut a shamrock shape or you can use this free shamrock template we used.
The easiest way to cut out the shamrocks is to make the shamrock outline in pencil on the BACK.
For a fun activity later, you can cut out one four-leaf clover to hide among the other three-leaf clovers. Then have your child hunt the four-leaf clover down on their final project.
If your child is developmentally ready, you can let them help with the cutting. Using scissors is a great way to build fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. But this is a challenging shape to cut, so check out all our tips for scissor use here.
Creating a Shamrock Patch
Once you’ve cut out multiple shamrocks for your child, they can put them all together to create their own shamrock patch! We used a piece of light green construction paper as the background, and then glued the shamrocks on. Because the coffee filters are so thin, we recommend using a glue stick or white glue.
No matter which glue you use, letting your child do the glueing is a great way to build fine motor skills. If you decide on the white glue, put some on a plate and let your child use a Q-tip to transfer a dab of glue onto the paper.
Making a Shamrock Garland
Alternatively, you can make a fun garland as a St. Patrick’s Day craft with your shamrocks! Just glue the lucky shamrocks you cut out onto a string of yarn or clear fishing wire.
Having Fun with Crafts
We hope your child had as much fun making these as my son did! Remember, craft projects for kids are not about the final project. Focus on the process and creativity, and follow your child’s lead while gently guiding them.
Let us know how your unique shamrock crafts turn out!
Check Out More St. Patrick’s Day Activities
Looking for even more St. Patrick’s Day ideas? We have a lesson plan full of fun ideas, including more shamrock activities! Check out our fun activities, including math, science, and reading, to go with this shamrock art!
St. Patrick’s Day Sensory Bin
For some super fun sensory play with the color green and a pot of gold, check out this fun and cheap sensory bin you can make at home. Little kids will love it, and it’s super easy to make. You can really customize it to any child and budget.