With St. Patrick's Day right around the corner, we've been crafting up some festive green wreaths and colourful rainbows, using one of our favourite craft materials: tissue paper.

Reusing tissue paper in the craft room is a great way to give it a second life. I love it because it's versatile, colourful and inexpensive. The kids love crafting with it because they get to scrunch and crumple, which makes for a wonderful sensory experience.

Festive Green Wreath

What You'll Need:

• several shades of green tissue paper
• gold-covered chocolate coins
• a paper plate
• curling ribbon (we used green, gold and white)
• white glue
• low-temp glue gun

How It's Made:

To prepare this craft, I cut the centre out of a paper plate, then cut the tissue paper into squares that measure approximately 2.5" x 2.5".

Then this little one crumpled up her tissue paper squares and glued them to her wreath. Once the wreath was well-covered, she added the embellishments!

With a low-temperature glue gun, she glued the gold coins all around the wreath.

We've been using low-temp glue guns here for several weeks now, and the kids are doing really well with them. These glue guns don't get as hot as regular glue guns do, making them ideal for little hands to work with.

If you feel that your child isn't ready to use a glue gun, you can help with this step, or do it yourself. If you'd like your child to give it a try, simply keep a bowl of cold water nearby in case he or she needs to dip a finger into it.

For the finishing touch, have your child staple a cluster of green and gold curling ribbon to the bottom of the wreath.

Rainbow Wreath

What You'll Need:

• 1/2 paper plate
• tissue paper in rainbow colours (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet)
• cotton balls
• white glue
• markers in rainbow colours (optional)

How It's Made:

To prepare your rainbows, cut a paper plate in half, then cut a small semicircle out of the bottom of it. Cut the tissue paper into 2.5" squares. Because the kids are quite young, I used markers to draw a rainbow on each paper plate. This served as a colour guide for the children to follow. Starting with red on the outside, the boys crumpled their squares of tissue paper and glued them along the lines on their plates until their rainbows were filled in.

They finished up by stretching and fluffing up some cotton balls, and gluing one to each end of their rainbow. To display your rainbows, simply tape them to a window, and enjoy the happy splash of colour that they'll provide against the winter backdrop.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

This post was originally published in March 2013.