A Green FHE

I didn't have my act together enough to get my St. Patrick's Day FHE prepared for the Monday before St. Patrick's Day. So, as if I didn't have enough stuff going on St. Patrick's Day, we added FHE to the mix.

First, I had everyone and sit still for like two minutes while I rattled off facts about St. Patrick's Day - stuff about St. Patrick himself, stuff about how it's celebrated in the U.S., etc. etc. Then, I had each person take turns pulling something out of a big green bag. Each item stood for something I had taught them about St. Patrick's Day. The person had to say what that item stood for. They got a point if they got the correlation right. The person with the most points at the end got a little bag of those chocolate coins covered in gold foil.

So, for instance, I taught the fam that St. Patrick was abducted from his home in Great Britain when he was 16. He was a slave for six years until he escaped Ireland and went back to Great Britain. So, I had some handcuffs in the bag. When Dylan pulled out the handcuffs, I said, "Okay, so what happened in the life of St. Patrick that the handcuffs could symbolize?" He got it right off the bat - "He was a slave for six years!!!"

It would have been better to find, like, a little plastic ball-and-chain, but I couldn't find one of those. Anyways, everyone ended up earning equal points, Ben and Dylan because they have good memories, Sadie because Ben kept giving her the answers:

Then we had a treasure hunt, again, reviewing St. Patrick's Day facts.

Sadie and Dylan were racing all around (Micah fell asleep earlier that evening, so we let him sleep through FHE), trying to get to the clues before each other. They are so competetive:

The treasure was a little plastic leprechaun's pot with three little St. Patty's Day accessories inside:

Sadie got a tiara that says "Irish Princess":

Dylan got one of those bobbly antennae things:

And Micah got some sunglasses, which Ben modeled for us:

Sadie didn't realize that you had to peel the gold off the chocolate coins. I think she thought they were just painted with, like, gold sugar or something?:

So she bit into one and was shocked to taste foil. And dude, I was cleaning up these pieces of foil the whole next day during school. Because I live with a bunch of slobs. It's called a garbage, kids. I was too busy to make them clean it up that night. I should have waited until they came home from school the next day and made them clean it up themselves, but I had some people from the Infant/Toddler program coming over that day and needed to kind of clean the house up.

Anyways. The FHE was really fun - the kids loved it. Did it have any spiritual overtones? Um... no. We could have made it about missionary work, because that is the whole reason St. Patrick's Day originated in Ireland. He converted hundreds of people to Christianity from Paganism. But I just decided to make it a fun night of family togetherness. And that's okay. :)