Children love rainbows; they’re so colourful and mysterious, who can’t love a rainbow? They brighten up a dreary sky and give hope of better days to come. We live across the Atlantic from my parents and don’t get ‘home’ very often. But that doesn’t stop my children from having fun with their Nana! They enjoy craft times together over the webcam, or ‘Nanacam’ as we like to call it! This colourful paper plate rainbow with a pot of gold is one of those crafts.
The first step to making your paper plate rainbow is to cut a paper plate straight across about 1/3 of the way up, as shown in the picture below. Cut the edge ridge off of the small piece and discard it. The cut around the large piece, but not all of the way around. leave about 3-4 cm attached at the top. Repeat this process on the smaller piece.
Cutting the paper plates in this way will enable them to stand up on their own as you can see in the picture below. Nana is pretty clever, Tristan says!
The next step was Kallista’s favourite. The children used some felt-tipped markers to colour their rainbows. Tristan almost ran out of room for all of his colours while Kallista coloured in squiggles between the coloured lines I drew for her to use as a guide.
They did this while Nana watched from 3, 801 miles away! Sometimes technology is fantastic! When they were done with the rainbow, they coloured their pots. After their pots were coloured they added some ‘gold’. We used some gold foil I had in our craft stash, but you could use yellow tissue paper. They crumpled it up and glued it to the back side of their pots.
And this is the final result! Tristan wanted to make a background for his paper plate rainbow and pot of gold. He drew a sun and some grass on some blue printer paper. It finished off the scene perfectly.
My children love to use Skype to see my family, and they always look forward to doing crafts with Nana. In fact, they have another craft date this week!
If your family isn’t nearby, how do you help your children feel connected with them? I’d love to have more ideas.
Check out our pages for more fun St. Patrick’s Day ideas, Paper Plate Crafts, or spring ideas.
