St Patrick's Day Craft: Pot of Gold

With St. Patrick’s Day approaching, it’s time to start thinking about ways to keep the kids entertained for the afternoon. Sure, they’ll probably make some simple crafts at school, but there’s nothing like some quality mother and child time in the afternoon. This pot of gold craft idea is both cheap and easy and is sure to bring a smile to your child’s face when you put it out onto the dining room table.

The supplies aren’t going to cost you much and you can pick them all up from your local general store such as Wal-Mart or even better, save your money and go to your local dollar store.

• Paint brushes
• Black Paint (optional - gold)
• Clay pot
• Glue
• Gold Coin Chocolate Candy
• Multi-Colored Construction Paper
• Old Newspaper
  

You can get fancier if you’d like and go for high quality paint and a larger flower pot, but the general concept still applies.

Start out by either taking your clay pot outside to spray paint or paint it by hand on your kitchen table.

You should consider putting on two coats of paint for proper coverage, although your child may have a different agenda.

Make sure that you cover both the inside and outside with black paint. Another option is to paint the inside of your pot gold like I did, but that's up to you.

Depending on the age of your child, he or she may want to paint on different colors.

Mine is only 4 years old, so he painted on every color we had. This is fine because the real kick in doing crafts is spending quality time with your children.

Next, and probably the trickiest step of all, is using the colored construction paper to make a rainbow to glue onto the side of the painted pot.

The colors of the rainbow are red, orange, yellow green, blue, indigo, and violet (in case you forgot!), so make sure that your construction paper booklet contains at least one sheet of every color..

NOTE: I couldn't find a construction booklet that contained indigo so I painted the one sheet of paper a darker blue.

You can make your rainbow however you want, but in my example, I used two size paper plates to draw a large circle and a smaller one inside as shown in the picture to the right.

Depending on the size of the flower pot you used, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t make the rainbow strips too long.

Once you have at least one color cut out, you can use it as a template for the remaining colors. Once your circles are done, cut them in half.

With all of your strips cut out, use a small paintbrush to glue all the pieces together to form a rainbow.

I started with the top color of the rainbow and worked my way down overlapping them, keeping one edge wider and the other narrow.

Once dry, trim your rainbow and glue to the inside of the flower pot.

Once the glue has dried, you can add your gold coin chocolate candy into the pot. Kids will love being able to take gold coins from the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

If your children are unfamiliar with the history of St. Patrick’s Day, you can spend the time constructing this paper craft and explaining to them the significance of the holiday and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.