We’re not an incredibly Irish family, but we do have a little mixed in from my side of the family. I’m pretty sure the American way is to celebrate the holiday like we are all raging Irishmen for a day. In my youthful days, it meant green glitter makeup along with green for every clothing item I wore, and spending the night out with friends. Eventually it morphed into running our local St. Patrick’s day 10K in a green tutu or finding a place my husband could eat corned beef because I certainly wasn’t cooking it. Now we have kids, so my focus has switched from drinking to St. Patrick’s Day craft projects like our pot of gold rainbow, learning about leprechauns, and crafting cute shirts for my kids to wear. Wow how times change.
We’ve been working on learning colors lately, especially with one of my favorite Usborne titles, The Big Book of Colors. Since my kids are obsessed with rainbows, I thought that making a fun craft with a pot of gold rainbow would be a perfect pairing to our book for the holiday.
What You’ll Need
- Construction paper in black & white
- Tissue paper in a rainbow of colors
- Gold glitter foam paper
- Glue/Glue sticks
Time for the FUN!
Craft prep in advance is strongly encouraged with this project. I would definitely avoid cutting tissue paper squares with little curious hands trying to scatter your hard work all over the kitchen or playroom floor. My prep work included cutting a black “pot” out of construction paper (older kids could cut out a design you’ve traced for them), cutting tissue paper into small squares and stacking into piles for each color of the rainbow, and cutting small circle “coins” out of the gold glitter foam. Not too hard, right?
Use your white construction paper for the scenery and start with your black pot. A glue stick is my recommended adhesive to help you avoid messes. My kiddos were able to use the glue stick on their own to get the pot sticky and needed a few cues to get it on the bottom of the page.
Now it’s time for your pot of gold rainbow! I know my kids can be grabby, so I suggest working with 1 color of the rainbow at a time. While you work with that particular color, it gives you a great opportunity to talk about the name of the color and what objects are that color too!
Create your first line of the rainbow with the glue stick, then let them have fun sticking the little red squares of tissue paper to that glue line. Once your done with red, move on to orange, and so on until you’ve completed the whole rainbow!
The gold glitter foam pieces are perfect little coins for your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If the glue stick doesn’t work with keep these in place (it worked fine on the foam we used), try using your regular glue. Kids may need help to avoid squeezing glue all over the floor or counter.
That’s it, you’re done! A super simple pot of gold rainbow craft to explore colors for St. Patrick’s Day!
Let’s Read!
After crafting time, we dug a little more into one of our favorite books, the Big Book of Colors!
There isn’t a story to this book, but our rainbow craft works great here since this book goes into extreme detail on objects and shades of colors. We love to look at the colors to point out familiar objects and to name new ones. Learning about combining colors, the color wheel, and even moods & meanings of colors!
Here’s a few things we learned!
- About half of people around the world say blue is their favorite color
- Human eyes can see more shades of green than any other color
- Over 100 years ago baby boys wore pink because it was seen as a color of strength
- If you spin a color wheel fast enough, all the colors would blend together to make white
- In China, a red lantern stands for happiness and good luck
This really is one of our favorite books for exploring colors, and working on vocabulary! I think the rainbow of colors worked perfectly with our St. Patrick’s Day pot of gold rainbow craft project! Getting ready for the next holiday? Take a peek at our Easter Chick book & craft pairing! If you love this book, and would like to see more, pop over to my facebook community or contact me to learn how to get it for free!
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
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