I don’t know about you, but I get so happy when Spring officially begins. What I love to see all around me are the bright greens shooting up through the ground, the buds appearing on the tips of the mango tree full of promise of juicy fruit, and ,without a doubt, nothing brightens my day more than pictures of rainbows drawn by my little Gia!
I guess I have been in a rainbow state of mind lately and I’d like to share some craft projects I’ve done over the past couple of weeks. For the most part I try to stick to projects that both my girls can have a hand in (19 months & 3.5 yrs).
Starting with St. Patricks day, I downloaded a really cute and free printable from here. Gia helped me put “Lucky Charms” cereal into snack-sized plastic baggies. Then I printed out the paper ‘topper’, cut it down to size (this part was done easily at my local Kinkos), and finally stapled them together. Her classmates loved this little treat.
Then, the girls and I had fun separating colorful cereal and using it to build our very own rainbow! Yes, a few were eaten along the way 🙂 Of course, the rainbow wasn’t complete until we added a few cotton ball clouds.
This last rainbow project has been especially great. While sucked into the vortex that is Pinterest (haha!!) I came across this clever blog post about painting rice. Boy have we had fun with this one! We bought liquid watercolors, and, after separating the rice into large resealable plastic bags, we had a blast while shake, shake, shaking them up. I spread the rice out on wax paper for an hour or so. It was tough on the little ones to wait for the rice to dry, but well worth i. We have filled up plastic water bottles and plastic Easter eggs to make musical interments, we have glued the rice onto pictures, and we have had fun just running our fingers through the rice to mix the colors up. I highly recommend this be an outdoor project!!! Unless you want to spend your whole afternoon sweeping up rice 🙂
Michele Lepe 