Make this cute rainbow craft as part of your St. Patrick’s Day decoration with your child today. This craft is great for kindergarteners or older children. If you want to do it with your toddler or preschooler, you will have to do most of the work for them.
This St. Patrick’s Day craft is a little more complex, but it still only took us about 30 minutes to make, when we worked together as a team. Depending on much you have to help your child, or how much he can and wants to do by himself, this craft may occupy him a little longer.
What you need:
- Construction paper in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, black and white
- Pencil
- Scissors
- Ruler
- Cotton balls
- Glue
- Gold glitter (optional)
- String
- Stapler
Instructions:
- Take your white sheet of paper and fold it twice to quarter it. Draw a cloud shape on it and while it is folded, cut out the cloud. This will give you four identical clouds.
- Take two clouds that match when put together back to back and glue a few cotton balls to the front, then set them aside to dry.
- To make your pot of gold, cut out a pot from your black construction paper. Then, cut out a semicircle or oval shape from the yellow paper and glue it behind the pot to make your gold. We added some golden glitter glue to the yellow to give it a nice little sparkle. From the green construction paper cut out a four-leaf-clover for good luck or a three-leaf-clover as a shamrock, and glue it onto the pot of gold.
- If you don’t know how to draw a shamrock or four-leave-clover, you can simply cut out three or four little green hearts and glue them together with their tips over lapping a bit.
- Now glue your pot of gold to a 3rd cloud and add a few cotton ball around the edges, then let it dry.
- Time to make the rainbow. Take your red, orange, yellow, green and blue construction paper and cut one long strip from each paper, about 1 ¼ inches wide.
- Stack them up in the order of the rainbow colors: red on the bottom, then orange, yellow, green and blue on top. Staple them together at one end.
- Now you have to do a little measuring. Make the orange strip 1 inch shorter than the red one, the yellow one 1 inch shorter than the orange one, green should be 1 inch shorter than yellow and blue 1 inch shorter than green. Your red strip is now the longest and the blue one the shortest.
- Line up the shortened ends of all five strips and staple them together again. You should now have a rainbow.
- Take the two clouds with the cotton balls you made at the beginning and glue them to back to back to one end of the rainbow, hiding your stapled end within the clouds.
- Next, take the cloud with the pot of gold and glue it to the other end of the rainbow. If you want, you can attach the 4th cloud to the back of it as well – and add a few cotton balls to it as well.
- Finally, put a hole in the center of each rainbow strip so you can put a string through it. Tie a not at the bottom and you are ready to hang your rainbow craft.
This craft is great for teaching the colors of the rainbow – you can add a purple strip if you like, but that would get quite short already, which is why we left it out for our craft.
Your child can also learn about measuring and get some practice cutting straight lines as well as curvy ones, and since they are clouds, it doesn't matter if they don’t come out with perfect lines.
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