St. Patrick’s Day gets us thinking about all things rainbows and pots of gold. Here’s a neat way to show a toddler how to make a full rainbow… just from the three primary colors!

To start, I cut an arc from contact paper and taped it down to the floor. I then cut lots of tissue paper squares in red, yellow, and blue. I had these mixed in our craft tray which I soon worried was a mistake, instead of sorting them. But the big messy mix turned out to be half the fun!

To make the rainbow, you’ll need to work deliberately row by row. An outer row of red is followed by an overlapping yellow (to make orange), then plain yellow. Next overlap blue (to make green), then add a row of plain blue. Finally, overlap a little more red and you’ll get a bottom row of purple.

Veronika wasn’t old enough to understand that the colors needed to stay in their proper rows, but I soon realized the benefit of having mixed all the colors in the tray; she was the perfect helper to find me each right color. “Now let’s find only red squares!” I told her, and she happily dug through the tray.

Then she discovered how fun it was to make the tissue paper rain down as I finished up the rainbow.

The real engagement with the craft began for her once the suncatcher was taped to the window. Of course there’s the obvious element that now it sparkled and shone…

…but now the full rainbow magically appeared as well. Where red and yellow overlapped, there was orange; yellow and blue made green, and blue and red made purple. We sang rainbow songs and Veronika loved following the arc of it with her fingers.

Next she pretended her favorite toy was sliding up and down it! We’re going to keep this beautiful rainbow suncatcher in the window to cheerfully greet the spring.