Add these gold coin activities to your St. Patrick’s Day activities for preschoolers and kindergarten kids today! Some of the ideas are specifically for St. Paddy’s Day, while others would work just as well for a pirate theme or a unit about money.
In addition to being fun and engaging, these hands-on gold coin ideas help kids learn. You’ll find math, science, literacy, sensory, fine motor skills and more!
These kids’ activities with gold coins can also be adjusted based on the needs and ages of your students. This allows for easy differentiation within the classroom, but with the same general materials.
Related: Free Preschool Printables
This is a collection of gold coin activities. That means you’ll find multiple links below, each one leading to a different activity or printable that incorporates gold coins.
So take a look through the entire post and determine which ideas are your favorites. Then click on the individual links (blue, underlined text) to read about each of the individual ideas.
Why Use Gold Coins in Preschool Activities?
Manipulatives and loose parts are used so much in early childhood lessons and activities. And rightly so – they’re materials that enhance hands-on learning and play. Plus, they’re often super engaging for the kids.
And boy, gold coins sure fit that bill, right?! They’re great manipulatives because they’re generally easy to find and usually pretty inexpensive. Children have a blast using them for all kinds of things, as well. And they’re very hands-on, fitting into hands of all sizes.
Hands-On Preschool Materials
Each of the gold coin activities shared below come with their own individual materials list. That being said, if you have a few things on-hand and ready to go, you’ll be able to run with many of the ideas. Here are some (I may get commissions for purchases made through links in this post):
- Plastic gold coins (of course!!!)
- Rice, dry chickpeas, yarn, or other favorite sensory bases
- Kid-friendly tweezers
- Slime making materials
- Playdough
- Paper
As I said, that’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s a great place to start!
Gold Coin Activities
Now let’s jump into all of the activities using gold coins! I tried to line the links up with their corresponding images in the collages. Please remember this is a collection of ideas, so there will be multiple links to check out below!
Our Favorite Kids’ Activities with Gold Coins
First up are the gold coin activities I’ve done with the kids over the years. These have been played with in my classrooms with my students, as well as at home with my son.
So when I say they’re our favorites, I’m not joking. These are definitely kid-approved ideas!
- Make a rainbow yarn sensory bin and add gold coins, tweezers, and the free printable 10-frames for math and sensory play.
- Set up a St. Patrick’s Day sensory bin with gold coins, pots, and colorful chickpeas.
- Practice letter identification, letter sounds, and high frequency words with a gold coin alphabet activity.
- Use the pot of gold number cards and counting mat to practice number recognition and one-to-one correspondence.
- Hide gold coins in homemade gold slime! This has proven to be one of our most favorite gold coin activities over the years.
- Gold coins fit in perfectly among our pirate messy play sensory bins, too!
If we try any new activities or lessons using gold coins, I’ll be sure to update this list based on the kids’ reactions!
Even More Gold Coin Activities
As promised, I have even more hands-on fun involving gold coins. Let’s check them out below:
- Use the coins to set up an easy memory matching game for kids.
- Turn gold coin hide and seek into a fun math game.
- Grab a different kind of “gold coin” for St. Patrick’s Day literacy and math on the light table.
- Have a literacy lesson outside with a gold coin vowel drop.
- Play an addition game with gold coins and a free printable.
- Go on an ABC gold coin scavenger hunt!
- Challenge your little scientists with this St. Patrick’s Day ice play.
- Pair gold coins with leprechaun’s playdough, be it store bought or homemade.
- Ask your students to find the gold coins in a St. Patrick’s Day sensory activity involving oobleck.
- Delve into storytelling with a pirate island play dough invitation.
- Explore Montessori pirate activities using gold coins, like the sensory writing tray pictured above.
- Practice one-to-one correspondence and other early math skills with some easy St. Patrick’s Day math activities.
- Break out the treasure chests for a beginning sounds treasure hunt.
- Try gold coin counting by 10s after reading Jack and the Beanstalk.
- Make leprechaun slime with the kids.
Now that you have over 20 gold coin activities to try with the kids, which one are you going to give a go first? Be sure to save this post for future reference. A St. Patrick’s Day Pinterest board or a Pirate Theme Pinterest board are good places to start.
St. Patrick’s Day and Pirate Lesson Plans
Let Preschool Teacher 101 save you a ton of planning time so you can focus on what you do best – teaching and connecting with your students. We have hundreds of lesson plans, circle time songs, dramatic play sets, digital games, classroom management guides, and so much more!
I think these two lesson plan sets would pair the best with the gold coin activities. Click on the individual images to get your own:
Make sure to check out The Pack, our membership for preschool and kindergarten teachers. Members get access to our resources at a very steep discount, along with members-only content.
You can also find us on Teachers Pay Teachers.
Originally published March 2015.
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