March 8 // Activities + Thoughtfulness // Rainbow Magic Trick, Shamrock Concentration, and More!
Here are some fun and simple ideas for next Thursday!
We’ve got some fun St. Patrick’s Day-themed activities planned for this week that shouldn’t take you much prep time or effort!
Though the stories and legends about St. Patrick are interesting, these activities are mostly just having fun with green and rainbows ☘️🌈
Here are the ideas in this newsletter:
Rainbow Magic Trick
Shamrock Concentration Game
Rainbow Toast
Act of Thoughtfulness: Shamrock Notes
A Note on Watercolors
Rainbow Magic Trick
This is a fairly impressive magic trick that literally even a toddler can do!
Here’s what your guests see: lidded glasses (or jars) filled with water. (We used these.)
The most important part of a magic trick is the show. Your child will dramatically say “Abracadabra” or tap the glasses with a wand (or whatever their signature move is.) Then, they will shake the bottles, and the clear water will transform before your very eyes!
It’s very satisfying to watch, and there’s a good chance many of your guests—child and adult alike—won’t be able to figure out how the water transformed.
Ready for the solution?
Here’s the secret: swirl some gel food coloring in the lid with a Q-tip! Isn’t that fun? Credit goes to the DadLab Youtube channel for the idea!
Shamrock Concentration Game
Our family had a lot of fun making (and playing) this game inspired by Handmade Charlotte. All you need is cardboard, scissors, and paint! Our version doesn’t look as pretty as hers, but it was kid-made, so it’s a win 🏅
First, paint one side of the cardboard in some kind of uniform pattern. Let dry, and cut into squares. You need enough to make a square of tiles; 9, 16, 25, 36, etc. (Our game pieces were only uniform-ish and square-ish. Kids don’t care, though!)
Then, make pairs of designs on the other side of the game pieces. We used watercolors and finger-painted 3-leaf clovers and 4-leaf clovers in different colors. We also used markers to draw symbols like the Irish flag, a rainbow, a pot of gold, and even snakes (because of the legend that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland.)
Once you’re ready to play, lay down all the square tiles pattern-side up, and take turns flipping over two tiles at a time to try to find a pair. When someone makes a match, he or she gets to go again. Whoever gets the most tiles by the end of the game wins!
Bonus, this game helps you work on this month’s personal growth theme: attentiveness. You have to really concentrate on what’s behind each tile and keep it in mind. You can obviously make this harder for older kids and adults by increasing the number of tiles and designs! Have fun!
Rainbow Toast
We try to avoid food coloring because some kids have really bad reactions to it, but this activity might be worth an exception to the rule! Simply mix milk with neon food coloring and paint some bread! You can use Q-tips, but paintbrushes work better.
After toasting, the colors are still super bright!
Since the bread absorbs the milk so quickly, this activity takes awhile to do 👌 and you can play some Celtic music in the background to make it even more of a multi-sensory experience!
Act of Thoughtfulness: Shamrock Notes
This is another idea inspired by Handmade Charlotte that you can’t really mess up; even toddlers can make pretty art to give away!
We made this printable for you that has shamrock outlines and punny message suggestions. You can just use paper or cardboard and cut your own clovers, though!
Simply invite your kids to decorate the paper, and when they’re done, cut out shamrock shapes!
You can write little messages on them and give them out like Valentines, or you can glue them onto cardstock and send a sweet card to someone.
This was a very satisfying activity because the kids didn’t feel pressure to paint a landscape or do anything impressive. They just made patterns however they liked, knowing that it would be cut up anyway.
A Note on Watercolors
As we mentioned in last week’s newsletter, watercolors are an excellent screen-free boredom buster. Over the years, we’ve bought over a dozen different kinds of watercolor sets in an attempt to find the Best Overall to recommend for families.
The #1 winner right now is this $10 set by Doodle Hog that we found on Amazon (pictured above.)
We’ve noticed that higher-quality paint sets tend to include a “swatch sheet” for testing out each color, and it’s a big bonus when the paint comes in removable pans.
Removable pans is are perfect for toddler artists since you can give them one color at a time so they don’t mix up all the colors and ruin the paint. (That’s why we love Kuretake paints, pictured below; the pans are huge, albeit a little pricey.)
Whew, that was a lot of ideas! Hopefully you found some you liked!
Warmly,
Hope and the Family Scripts team