Leprechaun Trap Engineering

Leprechaun Trap Engineering Ideas for St. Patrick’s Day

The Leprechaun Trap

“The Night Before St. Patrick’s Day” by Natasha Wing and illustrated by Amy Wummer is the perfect book for St. Patrick’s Day. STEMHAX creators chose this well written and rhyming read aloud to create our companion and activity packet. It was easy to incorporate Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, History, Art and Xtra cool stuff to correlate with this cute book. Amy Wummer must have deep a love for St. Patrick’s Day as it shows in her illustrations. I imagine that she is also a fan of engineering, too.

The Night Before St. Patrick’s Day

In the book the kids set traps to try to catch a leprechaun. There are five examples that your children can use for inspiration when they decide to take this engineering challenge. We were inspired by the “Lucky Leprechaun Slide” from the story. Check out the FREE Book Spotlight

===> CLICK HERE<===for Guided Discussion Questions

After the read aloud, there is a simple book report to assess students that can be accessed by clicking the image below:

Alternative Online Books

There are a few books that are about trapping a leprechaun. Here are some alternative books to The Night Before St. Patrick’s Day. These are wonderful if you already read our top pick on last years St. Patrick’s Day.

How to Catch a Leprechaun

This cute little St. Patrick’s Day rhyming book is sure to please your young reader, and inspire anyone to engineer a leprechaun trap!

How to Trap a Leprechaun

“How to Trap a Leprechaun” written by Sue Fliess, is read by the Storyteller at Kid Time Story Time. Leprechauns are full of trickery. If you catch him will he grant you a wish? Only one way to find out…

Designing the Trap

There are so many different options to consider when planning the trap. Using an engineering planning process will help children to create the idea in their heads and write it on paper. The four stages for early childhood are to ask, imagine, plan, create and test. Here are the materials we used to create our trap, should you want to replicate the idea for your students.

Materials List:

Empty oats container
Construction paper
Faux gold coins
Tooth picks
Wooden skewers
Green play dough (we made ours from scratch)
Mini-marshmallows (recommended for younger children)
Cotton balls
Glue
Stickers
Markers
Scissors

Designing Assistance

We have added these elements to the St. Patrick’s Day Companion. It is available in our TPT Store at an affordable price. CLICK to see the entire St. Patrick’s themed companion.

Help students by using these sheets:

After testing the trap, write a report to conclude findings.

Kids can try to recreate this trap, or use different items to make their own creation. Younger kids will make their traps and even though they may not look like the one we created, it will still be great! They will see this as art as well, and their version might work better. There is no real way to test the trap until March 17th, when kids can look to see if they actually caught the tricky little man with his pot of gold.

We made a sign to entice him to climb up the ladder and once at the top he will need to slide down to get the faux gold. We don’t think he will be able to get out, as there are no stairs!

Remind children when they are engineering their leprechaun traps, they want the leprechaun to go in, but not to escape. The most important thing about designing the leprechaun trap is to have fun! The engineering process can take a few attempts to get it to work. Encouraging children to think for themselves is key, and asking open-ended questions helps (Yes or No answers end the thought process). This is how they learn and utilize critical thinking skills.