Tissue Paper Rainbows + A Cool Rainbow-Drawing Trick

 With spring and St. Patrick's Day right around the corner, it's the perfect time to make some of these colourful paper plate and tissue paper rainbows! We're going to show you a nifty little technique for drawing rainbows too! The kids always love this process! 

You will need: 

• paper plates
• markers (rainbow colours)
• scissors
• tissue paper (rainbow colours)
• glue
• paintbrush (optional--more about that later)

Now for a fun and easy way to make a rainbow: Begin by talking to your child about rainbow colours and rainbow order. From your collection of markers, ask your child to find the colours you'll be using. You'll need red, orange, yellow, blue, green, purple.

Now the fun begins! Starting with the red marker, have your child draw a red circle just inside the outer edge of the paper plate. Next, moving in a little, have her draw an orange circle. Continue moving inward with your circles and colours, until you have a small purple circle in the centre of the plate. 

Now it's time to turn those circles into a rainbow! Cut straight across the middle of the paper plate, and voila! Two rainbows! 

It's time to decorate those rainbows: Cut your tissue paper into 1-inch squares. 

Now have your child match the coloured squares of tissue paper to the lines and glue them in place. Glue sticks and glue bottles are great for fine-motor and hand muscle development, but they be can be frustrating for very young children to use. Often toddlers just don't have the strength to squeeze the glue out of the bottle. I pour a bit of glue into a small cup, and give the toddlers paintbrushes. Their fine motor skills are still exercised, but they can work much more independently this way. 

Your child can apply her tissue squares however she wishes. She can lay them flat, or crumple them up before sticking them on. 

Don't fret about colour order if your child is very young. Preschoolers will likely want to match their tissue paper to the coloured lines, but toddlers may want to simply explore and create. Let them! The process and the experience is far more important than a perfect end result. And now matter how your child assembles his rainbow together, it will be beautiful! Display your rainbows in a sunny window or anywhere you want a cheerful burst of colour in your home!